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
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
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
Recently, the creator of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street came out and said what we already all knew: Bert and Ernie are a lovable gay couple. But still some people deny it. Emily Writes – who watches a lot of Sesame Street – says those people are making her lose her mind. For reasons that will … 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, the podcast studio is extremely hot and we’re extremely distracted by live-streaming to 10+ people on Facebook. There’s so much reality TV news that we don’t know what to … Read more
Gogglebox NZ takes a bunch of ordinary Kiwis, chucks them onto a sofa and films them as they watch television. Tara Ward watched them watching. “Don’t laugh too much, your teeth might land on the table.” Last night three new stars flew into our lounge rooms like a pair of falsies hitting the coffee table. Retirement … Read more
It’s the home stretch on The Block NZ and things are getting more fragile than a marshmallow spaghetti sculpture. It’s Week eleven of The Block NZ, and the wheels have officially come off. Life in Hobsonville Point is careening out of control like a bunch of balls Mark Richardson just threw onto a footpath in the … Read more
It’s week five on The Bachelor Australia, and shit’s getting real. Miriam Moore recaps the drama. For the first time in this season of The Bachelor Australia, we are left with enough girls that I finally know each of their names. Last week saw the mass eviction of the mean girls, with the remainder effectively singing an … Read more
Alex Casey crunches the numbers on the new Married at First Sight NZ contestants and returns with some shocking predictions. Ahhh, time. She’s a fickle mistress. She’s a relationship-ruining text sent from your Nokia 3315 to the person that the text was about. She’s a pig that’s nicked your toothpaste, slipping through your fingers as you … Read more
61% of people working on the minimum wage in New Zealand are women. RNZ’s new documentary series Minimum gives a voice – and more importantly, a face – to these women. Sam Brooks reviews. In 2017, there were roughly 76,400 people on minimum wage in New Zealand (which was $15.75 an hour at the time), and … Read more
Jane Yee and Alex Casey from The Real Pod spent an afternoon at Hobsonville Point to bring you this harrowing report. The Spinoff TV airs 10.45pm on Three, click here to catch up on ThreeNow
Because what your Friday needs is a loneliness lesson in te reo and a touch more Mark Richardson. Tonight on The Spinoff TV, we celebrate Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori with a very special three-part lesson in expressing your loneliness. Hayden heads to Nelson to gets to the guts of the 1080 debate, The Real … Read more
Inexplicable blockbuster sitcom Mrs. Brown’s Boys returns to TVNZ tonight. Jean Sergent writes about the show’s transphobia and how we as a culture need to do better. A show that hinges on a man in a dress making broadly sexual jokes shouldn’t be a multi-award winner with sell-out live shows, but it is. The Radio … 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, we rip into the week in reality television as powerfully as we rip into a delicious tub of peanut butter Häagen-Dazs. The women of The Block NZ have shattered the … Read more
Just when you thought The Block NZ had thrown everything at us, Mark Richardson uttered the immortal words: “Welcome to Sheep World”. Tara Ward recaps another bewildering week on The Block NZ. It wasn’t Country Calendar, it wasn’t The Dog Show, it wasn’t even NZ Farmer of the Flipping Year. It was week ten of The Block … Read more
The Stephen King super-series hits Lightbox in its entirety tonight, and thankfully, it’s come with A Plan and An Answer to all its mysteries. Uther Dean reviews. In the small town of Castle Rock, shit is going down. The head warden of the local prison kills himself. The new warden discovers a haunted, silent man … Read more
Week four arrives full throttle with our most intense the Bachelor Australia episodes yet, giving the producers almost more airtime than the Honey Badger himself. In a twist about as surprising as Don Brash writing an opinion piece on te reo Māori being useless, three “intruders” find themselves arriving at the Bachelor mansion. We’re … Read more
Combining the social dynamics of Survivor, the hidden cameras of Big Brother and a cast of Kiwi five-year-olds, Alex Casey finds the perfect reality show. While it’s unbelievable that it’s been 125 years since women got the vote in New Zealand, it’s absolutely mad that it’s also taken this long for The Secret Life format to … Read more
The groundbreaking sci-fi TV series The X-Files turns twenty-five today. Sam Rutledge writes a love letter to the show and the things that make it special even now. I have something to confess. When I was in my teens, I was one of two moderators for a Livejournal community dedicated entirely to watching episodes of The … Read more
Our queer and women comics have been charging ahead and spotlighting its issues with gender and sexuality. Dejan Jotanovic writes. Something huge happened last month. We did it. We won. We took home the mighty trophy, prompting an encouraging Instagram post from our humble PM. Rose Matafeo (Funny Girls) won ‘Best Comedy Show’ at the … Read more
The Real Pod assembles to dissect the week in New Zealand pop culture and real life, with special thanks to Nando’s. In a bleary Friday afternoon edition of The Real Pod, we reconvene to talk about a truly mad week in reality television. What was David Seymour doing on The Block NZ? How intense was Cass … Read more