Tara Ward takes a trip back in time with this classic 1980s New Zealand tourism video. Be warned, it contains bare buttocks. Covid-19 has made us tourists in our own country, so there’s no better time to wrap your optic nerves around the classic tourism film Come On to New Zealand. It was a 34-minute … Read more
A new sketch show on Comedy Central has heralded a new era for Pacific voices. But it’s not all big laughs and dick jokes – it’s much more sophisticated than that. The trailer for new comedy sketch show Sis, released in late June, is bloody funny. As a good trailer should, it takes some of … Read more
Last night Seven Sharp revealed to New Zealand children that the Tooth Fairy is not who they thought it was. Tara Ward relives this shocking moment. Something wild happened on Seven Sharp last night, and I don’t mean Jeremy Wells saying “light bladder leakage” after the first ad break. Wells was joined by Toni Street … Read more
Sam Brooks reviews the latest Netflix movie of the week: the mildly erotic sex thriller Fatal Affair. It has to be said that most rip-offs of Fatal Attraction usually have the sense of mind to change both words in that title. We’re all familiar with the plot of Fatal Attraction, even if we’ve never seen … Read more
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
From Twin Peaks to The OC, a great soundtrack can elevate any TV series. Insecure is just the latest example – and with all its seasons now streaming on Neon, Laumata Lauano talks us through her favourite needle drop moments. Straight up: the Insecure soundtrack is fire. I’ve known this since Issa Rae’s character Issa … Read more
Three’s new rugby-themed drama is both original and feels like it could have come from nowhere else, writes Duncan Greive. Over the past decade, New Zealand’s prestige (read: most well-funded) drama has established a trend of revisiting some of the country’s most celebrated characters and notorious incidents. Dear Murderer, Runaway Millionaires, Resolve, Jonah, Jean – … Read more
A new season of Big Brother Australia starts tonight, but where did it all begin? Tara Ward travels back to 2001 to relive the best moments from the show’s inaugural episode. Hold on to your three-quarter cargo pants and get ready to dial up your modem, because there’s a lot of unexpected chicken content during … Read more
Sam Brooks talks to actor-director Miriama McDowell, fresh from a top billing in Head High and directing Ahikāroa. There’s a moment in the second episode of Three’s new family-and-rugby drama Head High that stands out for me. A committee, entirely made out of bureaucratically-aligned adults discussing a student’s future in rugby, descends into personal attacks … Read more
Nadia Lim taught Sam Brooks to cook. He talks to the beloved celebrity chef about her new cookbook, and filming an entire TV show in lockdown. Lockdown brought us together as a nation. Together with our team of five million, together with our families and flatmates, but most importantly? Together with our ovens. As supermarkets … Read more