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
Alex Casey watches Eat, Drink, Love, a reality series following some of the feistiest women trying to climb to the top of the fickle LA food ladder. What’s it about? The reality series follows five kickass women working at the very top of the food industry in LA. From critics to home chefs, bakers to … 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
Woah, busy alert! I see you, shuffling papers and scrolling through your calendar with a furrowed brow. Life is crazy, life is hectic. TV? Forget about it! What a nightmare! Lucky for you, we have had a scan of the week ahead and have got your five essential television appointments booked. Sit back, relax and let the … Read more
Alex Casey is very good at watching cooking shows and very bad at cooking in real life. She took up the My Food Bag challenge to become a Masterchef in her own home. Despite spending close to 40,000 hours watching My Kitchen Rules NZ last year, I somehow remain the worst cook in the entire world. … 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
Eli Mathewson talks to Bree Peters, who plays the evil child-stealing murderer Pania on Shortland Street about being a soap villain. Last Thursday at 7.29pm, as Pania Stevens made the impulse decision to hijack Kylie’s car and kidnap TK’s toddler Tillie, was the exact moment that all of Bree Peter’s future nannying jobs ceased to exist. Since … Read more
Alex and Duncan dwell in the darkness of Louie, and tell you why you should get amongst this brutally honest – and sometimes surreal – comedy series. Sound like a bit of you? Click here to start watching Louie on Lightbox today
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
James Shaw is not just the co-leader of The Green Party, but the star of ‘Yes Minister’ in tonight’s episode of 7 Days. Here’s a quick Q&A with the panel, including a new dreadlocks policy. Jeremy Corbett: You defeated Kevin Hague for the co-leadership of the Greens. Is that the first time you’ve beaten off another man? … 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
The ‘Best Discovery’ section of Lightbox’s People’s Choice Awards is the Lightbox-iest category of them all. That’s what streaming services are really, really good at: giving you a vast lagoon of unfamiliar shows, and inviting you to dive right in. We here at the Spinoff are extra high level TV nerds, and had already seen most of the nominees … 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
Alex Casey sits down with Boganologist Dave Snell and his mate Fro, stars of TV2’s docuseries Bogans, to find out what’s actually going on beneath the leather jackets and car exhaust fumes. I was embarrassed to be sipping a peppermint tea next to two of New Zealand’s premiere bogans. “Let me know if you want … 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
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
Our pick of the best new shows to hit Lightbox this August – plus a full list of everything arriving on the service this month. The Killing, Season Four – Live now I will freely and in good conscience admit to having seen every single second of the US version of The Killing and precisely none … 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
11 months ago today, The Spinoff went live. The very same day, I flew out on a long-planned, month-long, un-delay-able trip overseas. So Alex Casey, who I barely knew at the time, kept the site alive during that first month. And has been its driving force since. I’ve been busy writing a book, commissioning, editing, … 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