One of my fondest memories from primary school is sitting cross-legged at my friend Elizabeth’s house, shrieking our way through the then-terrifying Nightmare VHS board game. As both an avid horror movie fan, and a fan of being yelled at by rotting middle-aged actors dipped in fluorescent paint, this was my absolute favourite activity. I’ve since bought … Read more
Steve Braunias watches a bad carrot tear down the dreams of a construction worker as Masterchef NZ broiled and braised its way to a top 10. Bloodthirsty times at Masterchef NZ, with Monday night’s axing of Chris the builder. He came, he saw an oxtail, he didn’t really know what to do with it. His … Read more
Days of Our Lives is one of the longest running soap operas in TV history, following love triangles, relentless pregnancies and the odd demon. Alex Casey watched it for a week and tried to make sense of the soft focus world. MONDAY As always, the week opens with an exhaustive supercut to get us nice an … Read more
Australian food television connoisseur and disappointment addict Eleanor Robertson journeys through cyber space and time to watch and recap TV3’s competitive cooking show, Masterchef New Zealand each week. Episode Seven Team challenges on Masterchef are often where things fall apart. Contestants who’ve been plating up lacy tuiles, singing arias to their soufflés, constructing elaborate shrines in front of … Read more
Wolf Hall is a BBC drama documenting the power dynamics of the court of Henry VIII. Unfortunately, while the 16th century had many things – the Church, fancy clothes etc – memes were not yet popular. We decided to fix that tragic historical accident by commissioning real life millennial Josh Davis to watch the brooding, … Read more
Two weeks since the last CDWMNZ scraps were scraped off our televisual plate, Alex Casey (big fan) and Joseph Moore (official Come Dine With Me NZ joke punch-up guy) mercilessly rank all 40 contestants from the first well-seasoned season. Story has officially made it to our screens, causing us to forget about Come Dine With Me NZ faster than a … Read more
Tara Ward ranks her favourite moments from the past week of Ferndale hijinks. This week: Pania exits stage left, Harry spews a geyser and we mourn for poor Pixie. 1) RIP Pikitea When last Friday’s episode ended with the Hannah whanau enjoying a rare state of joy, it could only mean one thing: grief … Read more
Alex Casey brings you the Bachelor in Paradise moment of the week. First up, an innocent phone call becomes critter communication at the hand of the maniacal Bachelor editors. Bachelor in Paradise is the messy mecca of reality television, throwing ex-Bachelor contestants together on a tropical island and waiting for the sparks to fly as they … Read more
Bringing together the TV moments of the week, including a raging studio radio documentary, the return of Broad City, Hayley Holt tackling Back Benches and a farewell to Pixie. Rise of the Radio Punks Prime’s excellent series of local documentaries wrapped this week with a breezy, boozy stroll through forty odd years of student radio. … Read more
UPDATE: Since publishing, some of the bachelorettes have got in touch. Turns out the “cucumber number” was far from a one-off. If you have read this already, scroll to the bottom for the update, including some very gross audio. It’s radio survey time in our fair nation, so chaos reigns on your dial. The evidence … Read more
“So you want to tell the history of student radio in New Zealand,” asks Mikey Havoc of his one-time sidekick Jeremy Wells. “Do you think you’ll be able to do it in a commercial television hour?” Havoc is, as always, deeply cynical. And perhaps right to be – student radio might be seen as a … Read more
Australian food television connoisseur and disappointment addict Eleanor Robertson journeys through cyber space and time to watch and recap TV3’s competitive cooking show, Masterchef New Zealand each week. Who’s got two thumbs and didn’t realise until too late that Masterchef NZ is now on two nights a week? Me. It’s me. Shoutout to episode four, in which the contestants … Read more
For Monitor this week, Aaron Yap looks at Humans, AMC’s new elegant sci fi drama that examines the not-so-distant role of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives. Artificial intelligence has long been one of the most commonly explored subjects of all science fiction. From the spookily prescient writings of Isaac Asimov and H.G Wells to … Read more
Story’s launch last week was the most important new show of the year for TV3. Duncan Greive watched every episode, and reports on how its first week fared. MONDAY The Story starts with some noodly post-rock guitar ambience, which is pretty cool and weird. Gives the whole show a welcome sense of impending doom. Who’s … Read more
Tara Ward ranks her favourite moments from the past week of Ferndale hijinks. This week: Pania takes the crazy cake, Chris yells about butchery and TK mumbles his way through every conversation. 1) Pania takes it to the edge Pania’s mental state is unraveling faster than a pair of pants from the $2 Shop. She … Read more
Alex Casey has a sprawling chat with Dani Robinson of The Bachelor NZ about mansion friendships, ruthless edits, and finding love in a hopeless place. I went over to Dani Robinson’s house the other week, to get her take on the brilliant behind-the-scenes TV drama UnREAL. As the runner-up of The Bachelor NZ, I thought … Read more
Bringing together the TV moments on the week, including Story‘s meaty first week, Brown Eye‘s finale and the hors-d’oeuvres of Gloriavale. Story Starts Strong The real replacement for Campbell Live arrived this week, finally giving us a chance to see whether all the pre-maligning was justified. Story came out of the gate with a rare … Read more
Calum Henderson goes forking mad for the latest competitive sport to hit Maori TV: furious forklift driving in The World Forklift League. Proof that mad genius is alive and well in Aotearoa New Zealand: 1. Somebody came up with the idea of forklift driving as a competitive sport 2. They then packaged that idea as … Read more
Alex Casey hits the televisual beach with a week of Home and Away, and discovers an unsteady sandcastle of drama featuring drugs, bums and cake christenings. I haven’t watched Home and Away since my intermediate days, sitting cross legged in front of the television, filling the endless void between bell time and dinner time whilst eating … Read more
TV3’s brand new 7pm current affairs show Story debuted last night. Duncan Greive and Alex Casey break down the crucial elements of the show with very big shoes to fill. Story is a show with extremely high stakes. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that as the show goes, so goes Mark Weldon. That’s not necessarily fair … Read more
Australian food television connoisseur and disappointment addict Eleanor Robertson journeys through cyber space and time to watch and recap TV3’s competitive cooking show, Masterchef New Zealand each week. In my time as Masterchef New Zealand recapper, so far I’ve chosen not to make fun of the judges’ and contestants’ Kiwi accents. This is half because accent gags are … Read more
Alex Casey watches the Gloriavale: Life and Death special on TV2, a documentary from the gated Christian community where the bonnets are bleached, the women have 12 kids and the male elders know all. Last night we were welcomed back into the utopian arms of Gloriavale: Life and Death, far away from the sexual and physical … Read more
Tara Ward ranks her favourite moments from the past week of Ferndale hijinks. This week: Steve makes waves from his hospital bed, Drew has a ponytail penchant and Murray makes a casserole. This week’s power rankings are a sumptuous buffet filled with farewells and fights, revelations and rumours, sexism and Steve. Fill your plate, grab … Read more
Former Metro digital editor Catherine McGregor recently moved to New York. Naturally, her first priority was obtaining a television, so she could watch the first Republican debate on Fox News. On my local public radio station, morning call-in listeners described how they were planning to watch the show. Comparisons were made to stand-up comedy, WWE, and the audition rounds … Read more
Alex Casey watches UnREAL – a drama set behind-the-scenes of a Bachelor-esque reality show – with The Bachelor NZ runner-up Dani Robinson, who dishes the dirt on how real reality TV really is. Set behind-the-scenes of a Bachelor-style dating show, the fictional world of UnREAL hints at the dark methods used to construct reality TV. Co-created by Marti Noxon and … Read more
On the eve of his final night behind The Daily Show desk, Finlay Macdonald pays tribute to Jon Stewart. One of The Daily Show’s funniest lines is the one that kicks it off every night: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York …” Whatever Jon Stewart might do next, the deliberately portentous voiceover defines … Read more
Your daily rolling recap of Come Dine With Me NZ, serving up piping hot takes on New Zealand’s greatest social experiment. Welcome to Come Dine With Me Daily, The Spinoff’s hub for all things Come Dine With Me NZ.We’ll be updating this post throughout the week as the show plays out, providing you with a denser dining experience … Read more
Calum Henderson spends an evening with TV One’s Dog Squad and Purina Pound Pups, and explains why you should get amongst these primetime pooches. TV One’s doggone double-header begins in the familiar ‘authority figures vs lowlifes’ format of reality programming that New Zealanders love so dearly. Despite an admittedly very exciting point of difference (dogs), … Read more
In our new feature A Week Of It, a Spinoff writer watches a show every day for a week and reports back with their findings. This week, Alex Casey watches a week of The 4.30 Show to find out what the cool teens of New Zealand are up to. Despite the amount of people telling … Read more