Over 20 years since it aired on TV One on a quiet Sunday night, Aaron Yap remembers Peter Jackson’s hoax-documentary Forgotten Silver. Peter Jackson might have sold New Zealand to the world as a viable enchanting Middle Earth filled with Hobbits and Gollums, but his greatest trick remains convincing us – for a brief moment – … Read more
Claire Adamson is undoubtedly New Zealand’s premiere expert on the 90s What Now series This is Serial Stuff. This week she hit the jackpot after being sent over an hour of kiwi childhood nostalgia on Youtube. The Reddit envelope of doom blinked angrily from the corner of the page. “Read me!” it screamed, a tiny, triangle-filled precursor of terrible, hate-filled, … Read more
For Bryan Fuller, death has always been a source of morbid aesthetic delight. In Hannibal, serial killings served as a canvas for culinary extravagance and beautifully grotesque tableaux. Prior to Hannibal, there was Pushing Daisies, a “forensic fairy tale” which couched its sweetly macabre story of a corpse-reanimating pie-maker in blindingly bright, candy-coloured art direction. … Read more
Aaron Yap channels a psychic race car driver in Baffled!, Leonard Nimoy’s bizarre failed pilot with a premise more implausible than anything Star Trek could have offered. Of all the TV work that Leonard Nimoy did in the early ‘70s, Baffled! may be the most, yes, baffling. After the original series of Star Trek ended in 1969, Nimoy didn’t have … Read more
Re-watching Dawson’s Creek – the classic late ’90s, early ’00s teen drama that launched the careers of Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson (and was probably the high point of James van der Beek’s, lets be honest) – it has become obvious I previously lacked a complete understanding of the finer nuances of the show. … Read more
This week, Alex Casey and Duncan Greive mine the extensive Lightbox catalogue to find the best shows of the ’90s and argue why they are just as relevant as the fancy new shows. Having television ondemand makes it easier to keep on top of the hot new shows, but also harder to watch everything, all … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Alex Casey watches a 1995 documentary that unearths the bizarre origins and rituals around Paeroa’s L&P bottle and Ohakune’s giant carrot. Our host Miranda Harcourt is taking us around New Zealand, looking at what different small towns have done to put themselves on the map. Invariably, it seems, there is only one option … Read more
Alex Casey remembers her most traumatic childhood television experience – watching videotapes of body horror kids’ show Round the Twist at primary school. My primary school had a reliever teacher called Mr Anchor. He would cycle in from the next town on a rickety bike, absolutely laden with bags of trinkets and musical instruments. If your … Read more
In light of her new music video and dominance of the entire world, Alex Casey revisits Taylor Swift’s less-celebrated cameo appearance on CSI. All this flat-out commotion about Taylor Swift’s new star-stuffed ‘Bad Blood’ video has distracted us all from her most stellar onscreen performance – her dramatic cameo role on CSI. It’s infinitely more violent than … Read more
For this Throwback Thursday, Calum Henderson watches Gary McCormick’s Heartland special on the tiger-footed town of Wainuiomata. Two big national events from the winter of 1994: in Dunedin, someone with the last name Bain shot his whole family, and in Wainuiomata, Gary McCormick shot an interview with a woman called Chloe for the TV show … Read more
With Noel coming to town this week for the NZ International Comedy Festival, Alex Casey breaks down some of his absurd hits from The Mighty Boosh. I can only assume that when Noel Fielding arrives in New Zealand this week, it will be on a bedazzled polystyrene unicorn. Just orbiting around and around baggage claim, … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, ex-cinema usher Alex Casey watches an Aardman claymation built entirely around real conversations between real foyer girls. You will know Aardman Animations now for the dynamic moon-eating duo Wallace or Gromit, or perhaps, for the more culturally unrefined, the screaming toilet slugs of Flushed Away. They’ve really done it all – Chicken … Read more
Claire Adamson shares her arduous journey to watch a few precious episodes of the part Barbie, part human after-school series This is Serial Stuff, and celebrates the smart technicolour antics of the iconic kiwi kids show. I want you to cast your mind back to a time before you were cool – catching the bus home, eating all … Read more
With TV3’s drive to find a new 7pm weeknight rating-killer, Joe Nunweek looks back at their mid-90s effort, a venture so amazing and bold that it was discussed in Parliament. If the doomsayers are right – and Campbell Live is not long for this earth – it won’t be the end of an era so … Read more
You don’t really see ads on TV anymore. What with the mute function, DVRs and streaming, this once proud tradition is not necessarily dead – but definitely not as great as it once was. I’m not saying there aren’t still great ads – the drug driving ads in the dairy and takeaway stores are comic … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Calum Henderson discusses In Bed With Chris Needham, a self-shot teenage cult classic from the BBC. It starts with a pale, spotty youth, shifting from foot to foot, hanging on the telephone. His astonishing barnet is the cumulative result of not just one but a prolonged series of bad haircuts. “I’m not … Read more
Calum Henderson looks back at the 1992 World Cup through the garish lens of Sky’s incessant memorialising and finds the coverage was as fine as the cricket. Was the 1992 Cricket World Cup really as good as everyone remembers it? Is it wrong to hold a flame for the golden summers of One World of Sport? … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Alex Casey discovers a deeply bizarre 1970s period show packed with family drama and, er, neighbourly relations. // I don’t know a lot about softcore pornography, but I know that the trailer for Swingtown looks like one: This 2008 series is set in 1976, and was made with the hopes of recreating … Read more
For this Throwback Thursday, Alex Casey looks back at Adam Levine’s brief but brutal stint in American Horror Story: Asylum. // It’s been a huge week for the American Horror Story anthology. Two days ago, there was some sad news that Ben Woolf, aka loveable Meep from American Horror Story: Freak Show had tragically died in … Read more
Aaron Yap argues that family crime drama Brotherhood deserves to steal some of the family-crime-drama limelight away from its older television siblings. // One consequence of the monumental successes of The Sopranos and The Wire is that a perfectly decent show like Showtime’s Brotherhood remains undeservedly underseen, unable to escape from their far-reaching shadows. This crime drama, … Read more
At the end of last year all the episodes of the ’60s Batman TV show were packaged together on Blu-ray and DVD for the first time. Alongside the original 120 episodes, there’s also three hours of special features. How special they are is a matter of opinion. José Barbosa offers his. It’s either comforting or dispiriting … Read more
In this special Bad edition of Throwback Thursday, Joseph Harper looks back at Bob ‘Saul’ Odenkirk’s alternative comedy career. // Before he joined the cast of Breaking Bad as unscrupulous attorney Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk carved himself out a broad and varied career in the alternative undercurrents of American comedy. Stints with Second City, Saturday Night Live, … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Aaron Yap applauds the metaphysical triumphs of a particularly buzzy episode of The Twilight Zone. // The conflation of metaphysical concepts and science has always been a difficult, tricky thing for me to swallow in TV and movies. Not that it’s impossible to achieve; for example, Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica was persuasive … Read more
Much like Ponsonby Road on a sunny day, Shortland Street is heaving with celebrities. Alex Casey looks back at some of the more memorable cameos. // Guardian of Our Small Claims Galaxy Kevin Milne Talk about the merging of two iconic New Zealand television worlds! In 1996, Nick Harrison appeared on Fair Go with legendary host … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Alex Casey revisits a Dawson’s Creek spin-off that handily doubles as the longest Coca-Cola advertisement ever made. // As the year slowly starts to wrap up and people lock in their summer holidays, spare a thought for the ill-advised Dawson’s Creek spinoff created for the show’s summer break in 2000. Young Americans features the … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Aaron Yap appreciates the long-tongued leather-clad genius of sci fi series Aeon Flux.// A funny thing happened when I began revisiting Peter Chung’s cult animated sci-fi series Aeon Flux for this column. Seeing it for the first time since the mid-‘90s when it was on MTV’s Liquid Television – a memorably messed-up anthology … Read more
With the return of University Challenge NZ to Prime this Saturday morning, Alex Casey watches the incredible 1988 final between Canterbury and Waikato. // Host Peter Sinclair welcomes us to the 1988 final, reflecting on the year that has been. He honestly looks like the perfect combo of Christoph Waltz, a Ken doll and this infamous dog wearing … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Joe Harper unearths a radiant piece of discarded treasure from Community creator, Dan Harmon. // Long before Dan Harmon blossomed into the self-styled narcissist-genius responsible for Community and next level navel gazing, podcast masterpiece Harmontown, he made Heat Vision and Jack. The show was created in 1999 by Harmon and frequent collaborator … Read more
This Throwback Thursday Alex Casey finds a hotbed of young talent in the TV adaptation of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. Reader beware, you’re in for a scare/moderate surprise. // The hottest news in the cinematic world is obviously the adaptation of R.L. Stine’s terrifying children’s horror series Goosebumps into a feature film starring Jack Black. So, now is … Read more