Wendy Petrie, 49, has lost her job to Simon Dallow, 56. TVNZ’s cull is mystifying on multiple levels, writes Duncan Greive. There’s a genuinely moronic characterisation of newsreading which holds that it’s a low skill job that anyone can do. Just read off the autocue for an hour, collect your $500,000 a year-ish salary and … Read more
Sam Brooks pens a love letter to the after-school gateway drug of the late nineties and early aughts: anime on free-to-air TV. If you look on the free TV schedule today, you’ll find a dearth of good after-school content for kids. Assuming a child-spawn gets home at around 3:30pm, they’ve got an hour of TVNZ … Read more
Think The Repair Shop is just a boring television show for the oldies? Think again. The Repair Shop is the nicest show on television, and yes, I am talking about that programme on Friday nights where old people take their old junk to an old shed to be fixed. Your nana probably loves The Repair … Read more
Oliver Tree is a semi-pro scooter athlete, a brilliant character actor, and a musician with a breadth of experience rare for any millennial. And he’s finally released an album. That skater-emo voice, those dirty pop beats, the tearing lyrics and absurdist videos – and then, out of nowhere, ska. Oliver Tree’s inspiration must come from … Read more
From 2005’s Wayne Anderson: Singer of Songs to new Tom Sainsbury comedy Sextortion, via a dead peacock, a trio of escaped circus lions and a sentimental wrist wallet: Calum Henderson pays tribute to the unique oeuvre of television creator Orlando Stewart. Orlando Stewart has never made a hit TV show. What he has done, dating … Read more
Carlson has long been one of our best comedians, and now the world can see it too, writes Sam Brooks. Last year, Urzila Carlson became the first comedian from our shores to perform her own Netflix special, a half hour episode of the Comedians of the World series. Now she’s the first New Zealander to … Read more
Neon’s gender-flipped version of High Fidelity features Zoë Kravitz in the role John Cusack made famous 20 years ago. And it works far better than you might expect, writes Catherine McGregor. By now we’ve all accepted the fact that every last artistic touchstone we hold dear will one day end up being reused, reinterpreted or … Read more
The 2020 longlist for the APRA Silver Scroll Awards – New Zealand’s premiere songwriting awards – have just been announced. Here’s the full list of the 20 finalists, with the songs themselves to listen to. This morning saw the announcement of the longlist for the APRA Silver Scroll, New Zealand’s most prestigious music award recognising … Read more
The new TVNZ On Demand political comedy relies on great performances to paper over a wafer-thin story, writes Jean Sergent. The set-up is simple: Darren Bellows (Tom Sainsbury), a Colin Craig-esque political loser, is being blackmailed by his dominatrix (Kathleen Burns). The stakes are high for Darren as the leader of the minor league Conservative … Read more
New Zealanders can’t get enough of The Chase, so why can’t we have our own version? And what would a homegrown version of the quiz show look like anyway? If The Chase were a pandemic, we’d all have herd immunity by now. The British TV quiz show has never been more popular with New Zealand … Read more
The Old Guard, new to Netflix, is a resounding success because it doesn’t focus on what makes these heroes great, it focuses on what makes them human, writes Sam Brooks. The climax of Netflix’s new movie The Old Guard shouldn’t be anything new, but it feels exhilarating. The titular old guard, a group of immortal … Read more
As yet more male-led festival lineups are announced, Shaquille Wasasala, aka halfqueen, writes an open letter to the industry. To those whose career it is booking talent for music festivals, punters, and people who listen to music. As a DJ and artist who exists at many intersections that directly inform my lens – booked artist … Read more
Basketball is growing massively in popularity around the country, led by thousands of youngsters picking up the game every day. To the Line looks at what it’s like for New Zealand high school kids with hoop dreams. If there’s been a narrative rumbling away in the sports pages, it’s that of basketball’s seemingly unstoppable momentum … Read more
People have called it for it be pulled from the service, but the escapist fantasy of 365 Days is nothing new, writes Alie Benge. To every generation, a bullish alpha-male psychopath is born, and is for someone reason considered a romantic hero. We’ve been through a lot this year, and instead of a Covid vaccine, … Read more
A new EP from an unknown Auckland singer ignited a bidding war before she’d released a single. Today ‘Call You Out’ is released, with eerie parallels to Lorde’s rise. Duncan Greive meets the artist known as Deryk. Madeline Bradley wasn’t expecting a lot. She’d been to dozens of these meetings over the past four years … Read more
Today The Beths release Jump Rope Gazers, the follow-up to their beloved and acclaimed debut album Future Me Hates Me. Back in December, Side Eye cartoonist Toby Morris joined the band in the studio while they recorded ‘Just Shy of Sure’, which you can listen to here: The Side Eye is a monthly non-fiction comic … Read more
Claire from McLeod’s Daughters died in 2003 and Tara Ward is still not over it. The unexpected death of Claire McLeod is the most tragic event you’ll see on television. It was a miserable day when that white Brumby bolted across the road and made Claire drive off a cliff, leaving viewers a traumatised wreck. … Read more
Keagan Carr Fransch reviews I May Destroy You, the acclaimed new show from British writer-director-actress Michaela Coel. The following includes discussion of rape, sexual assault, sexual violence, drug-facilitated sexual assault, and PTSD. Since the release of her comedy Chewing Gum in 2015, Michaela Coel has been a recurrent name on the list of writers to … Read more
With the world in lockdown, and a new album set for release, The Beths decided to keep playing live – from their living rooms. As the band prepare for their first show in front of a crowd in months, they tell Josie Adams the stories behind Live From ‘House’. When The Beths decided they wanted … Read more
Khruangbin have established their live reputation with spacious instrumentals, but the band’s third album, Mordechai, features prominent vocals and disco-funk jams. Andrew Drever interviews the Texas-based trio upon its release. While the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage in the US, the situation has actually been a blessing in disguise for Khruangbin drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson … Read more
Before Covid-19, it’d take a long flight and half a grand to see Hamilton in the flesh. Now, the biggest musical of the past two decades is available to watch on Disney+. Sam Brooks takes stock of this extraordinary move. Right now, Broadway is a sleeping dragon. New York theatres have been dark for months … Read more
With Shortland Street’s 7,000th episode screening tonight, Tara Ward salutes the soap for keeping calm and carrying on through level three lockdown. It’s been one heck of a week on Shortland Street. Leanne lost her winning $8 million Lotto ticket, Louis slipped over in a pile of vomit, and Desi tried to convince Dawn that … Read more
Netflix’s adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club makes long-time fan Tara Ward fall in love with the series all over again. When I was 12 years old, my class had to write a letter to a famous person. Some of my classmates wrote to an All Black, Tom Cruise or Hulk Hogan. I wrote a four-page … Read more
They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re at a precipice of a new frontier in both entertainment and performance. We’re Here is the new Neon show that takes drag out of the city and into small town America, writes Dejan Jotanovic. Drag, as an artform, isn’t by any means new. It was common practice in Elizabethan … Read more
Under Cover is a new series that brings musicians together via video link to bond, chat, and play each other’s songs. The fourth episode features Sharon Van Etten and Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins). American singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten and New Zealander Hollie Fullbrook of Tiny Ruins found each other back in the MySpace days, but … Read more
What are you going to be watching in July? The Spinoff rounds up everything that’s coming to streaming services this month, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, Neon and TVNZ OnDemand. Click here to see our listings from June. The biggies The Baby-Sitters Club (on Netflix from July 3) Hold on to your landline … Read more
Two Australian shows, three nights of television. Which reality veteran wins? New seasons of reality favourites Masterchef Australia and Big Brother Australia have hit New Zealand screens, posing a quandary for reality fans. Both shows are screening live-to-air at the same time, Sunday to Tuesday (Masterchef also screens on Wednesday), creating a dramatic head-to-head reality … Read more
As New Zealand’s musicians return to the concert hall, Richard Betts checks in with our classical music organisations for reasons to be cheerful. For a country that’s been shut since March, we’ve been surprisingly well-served by the performing arts. Most impressive was NZ Opera convincing TVNZ to broadcast a 2015 production of Puccini’s Tosca. So … Read more
The most famous solved cold case of the 21st century finds its way to the small screen in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, but it’s as much an ode to the closer as it is a depiction of the criminal, writes Jean Sergent. In the fervour of the true-crime trend, people who don’t get … Read more