The Real Pod assembles to dissect the week in New Zealand pop culture and real life, with special thanks to Nando’s. This week on The Real Pod, Jane remains in the city of angels so Alex and Duncan are joined by honorary corndog and Survivor NZ superstar JT. Together, they mow through a huge week in … Read more
The show Renters is a morality play about the sufferings inflicted on landlords by their terrible tenants. Hayden Donnell talks to one of the show’s stars ahead of its seventh season, and tries to convince her to support pro-tenant rental reform. It’s impossible to dislike Pru Morrell. The star of TVNZ’s reality series Renters is … Read more
The somewhat inexplicable 14th (!) season of Criminal Minds starts tonight on TVNZ. To celebrate, super-fan Jean Sergent reveals the cult classic series hidden within the long-running procedural. Three years ago I was in London doing a pretty great acting fellowship, but somehow I still found time to watch Criminal Minds on my laptop, which I perched … Read more
There are hearts on sleeves and mullets on heads as week seven of the Bachelor Australia brutally halves six sheilas down to three. Miriam Moore recaps. The very last group date sees a ’50s-clad Nick take the squad of six bowling. Sophie can’t stop looking at his muscles, whereas I can’t stop looking at his … Read more
A bee-based riff on The Hunger Games, a remake of your favourite problematic 80s film, and The Spinoff’s very own new doco-series. This is what’s new to Lightbox in October! Get It to Te Papa (weekly from October 16) “Get It to Te Papa began in great and abiding failure,” says Hayden Donnell, host of The Spinoff’s … Read more
Jogai Bhatt talks to Abdul Kay, a young Auckland rapper who rose quickly from obscurity only to go silent, about his comback single ‘September Freestyle’. By this time last year, Abdul Kay had already caught the attention of the local hip-hop scene. With a co-sign from industry heavyweight David Dallas, the newcomer was able to … Read more
Alex Casey walks back down the aisle for a second season of Married at First Sight NZ. Dust off your matchmaker iPads, rouse the digital birds and get that Sodastream making effervescent farts: Married at First Sight NZ is back for another romantic rollercoaster of a season. Look, I tried to predict what season two … Read more
The annual free concert featuring the top local pop stars of the day is one of New Zealand’s most enduring Christmas traditions. James Mustapic looks back at its most memorable moments. Watch all of James Mustapic’s Repressed Memories here.
It’s school holiday time again, and to help us survive the next two weeks of quality time with the fruits of our loins, we must turn to everything that is right and fair about the world: the television. It’s the friend we’ve always needed, in good times and in bad, in sunshine and in rain. … Read more
John Rykenberg ran a studio of Auckland photographers from the late ’50s through until the late 1970s. Last year, 900 boxes from his studio were donated to Auckland Libraries. One of the researchers investigating this massive collection of images was Gareth Shute, who shares some of his favourites. My interest in the Rykenberg collection came … Read more
Welcome to the very first episode of Project Runway New Zealand, in which the designers had to make a cocktail dress inspired by a soft drink so inspiring nearly everyone used white. Henry Oliver ranks the results. Watching the first episode of a competition-based reality show always feels a little sadistic. Who is going home … Read more
Duncan Greive watches The Block’s final nail and asks what this strange show tells us about New Zealand in 2018. 1) Auckland property is definitively chilling the hell out It was never intended to be a quasi-documentary about the other side of the housing crisis (the side where people made heaps of money flipping homes), … Read more
The Real Pod assembles to dissect the week in New Zealand pop culture and real life, with special thanks to Nando’s. Jane returns to save Alex and Duncan’s souls in this very special episode of The Real Pod, convened to celebrate and commentate the return of Married at First Sight NZ to our screens. The team … Read more
“All the teams want is a happy ending,” Mark Richardson announced, as he welcomed us to The Block NZ 2018 live auction. Speak for yourself, Mark Richardson. Tara Ward recaps. I’ve watched over 54 hours of The Block NZ to get to this point. It’s auction night: I want drama, I want tears, I want The Wolf … Read more
Who can bake good, and who will be baking bad? Our first look at the #GKBO contestants offers some valuable clues. Calum Hendersons ranks them. Good news everybody: life is finally about to get better. Go outside and you can feel it in the air, an unfamiliar sense of hope. Everything is going to be … Read more
1997 was a simpler time – British anarchists topped the charts and you could buy collections of the day’s hits on little plastic discs. It was also the year the very first local edition of Now That’s What I Call Music was released. Henry Oliver takes a listen to Now! Vol 1. It’s the end … Read more
Because Jacinda-mania has gone global and we are going rogue. Look, it’s been a mad week. There are needles in the strawberries, ball bearings in the ice cream, and it seems like our prime minister is never coming home. Why not unwind by watching Mike Hosking’s favourite TV show on a Friday night?! Here are … Read more
Three’s Pilot Week is done – but how good were the pilots, and which ones should get commissioned? Sam Brooks reviews. It’s been a wild week, y’all. I can’t remember the last time we had two and a half hours of new New Zealand comedy content for an entire week on our screens. (Probably the first … Read more
The Real Pod assembles to dissect the week in New Zealand pop culture and real life, with special thanks to Nando’s. This week on The Real Pod, Duncan and Alex are left to stumble through a cold and uncertain world, like poor moonboot-wearing Jamie-Lee on The Bachelor Australia. As a result, you’ll get all the reality … Read more
Friends, we’ve finally made it. Tools are officially down, and The Block NZ is nearly over for 2018. Tara Ward recaps. For the past 12 weeks we’ve stared into an abyss of portaloos and pavers, of hypnotists and Heimlich manoeuvres, of sheep mustering and nipple coloured walls. We’ve endured pointless challenges with sponge cake and sudoku … Read more
Emotions are high, feelings are plenty, and we’re one moonboot down. There’s no doubt we’re reaching crunch time in this week’s episodes of The Bachelor Australia. Miriam Moore recaps. Episode 11 begins with sassy Cassie finally having her name read out on the single date card. In the background, music akin to the “passionate kiss” … Read more
Anika Moa Unleashed had a triumphant first season, and showcased the singer-personality as one of our best interviewers, but what does the second season do with her? If you wrote Anika Moa as a character in a work of fiction, you’d be told she was too perfect and you had to go back to the drawing … Read more
Forget the UN. Forget the Today show. The undeniable high point of the NZ prime minister’s trip to New York is her imminent appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Lucky for her, Tim Lambourne has her back. In 2013 I interviewed Jacinda Ardern on a late night comedy chat show. Three months later the show … Read more
Chris Warner, House, Shaun Murphy, Meredith Grey, Mindy Lahiri – there are a lot of doctors on our television, but who is the goodest? Madeleine Chapman investigates, and the results may surprise you. The Good Doctor season two drops on Lightbox weekly, starting from today. You can watch the entire first season on Lightbox right … Read more
Ex-Kids of 88 star Jordan Arts talks bidding wars, bigwigs and breakdowns – and tells Hussein Moses how, with new project HIGH HØØPS, he came out the other side. When Jordan Arts is in “aeroplane mode”, that means it’s time to get to work. It’s the term the Auckland musician uses to describe his late-night … Read more
Three’s Comedy Pilot Week starts this Sunday night on Three – but what is this newfangled thing? Sam Brooks gives you the low down. Five new shows over four nights? Isn’t there already enough TV to consume? Yes, reader, there is. But this one is worth your time, even in this age of peak TV, … Read more
Brockhampton are a new breed of boyband who have quickly risen from a Kanye messageboard to a multi-million-dollar record deal. Reilly Hodson reviews their new album, documentary and concert in Auckland last night. “I think that we wake up every morning and think about what we can make to make people happy,” says Kevin Abstract, the … Read more
Because it’s suffrage week, we’ve got ourselves a right lady-fest on The Spinoff TV tonight. Tonight on The Spinoff TV, we celebrate suffrage week with an all-women episode featuring Anika Moa: queen of television, burps and oversharing. We talk about her new album, revisit the paranoia of Y2K and get stuck into what ads really … Read more
To celebrate Hobbit Day (September 22), Alex Casey binges the entirety of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogies on Lightbox. I’ll never forget the sunny afternoon that I spotted Andy Serkis on the imaginatively named “Main” street of “Grey” town during the height of The Lord of the Rings madness. I would’ve … Read more