Brynley Stent’s life in TV (Photo: Todd Karehana / Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureMarch 1, 2025

‘I can’t believe that happened’: Brynley Stent on the TV moment she’ll never forget

Guest writer

Brynley Stent’s life in TV (Photo: Todd Karehana / Design: Tina Tiller)

She once eliminated The Bachelor on Celebrity Treasure Island. Now Brynley Stent is the one on a televised quest for love.

Having first burst onto New Zealand screens in Funny Girls, Brynley Stent has gone on to have a rich and varied television career. She’s worked on shows like Jono and Ben and Golden Boy, and starred in Shortland Street, My Life is Murder, Taskmaster NZ and Celebrity Treasure Island. But her latest venture, Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club, reveals a new side to the comedian, actor and writer, as she and close friend Kura Forrester travel the country on a surprising search for love.

Whether it’s a student party in Dunedin, a game of pool in a Stewart Island pub and or a black tie ball in Canterbury, Bryn and Ku travel far beyond their comfort zones to find romantic connections. The series is hilarious and heartwarming, but it’s also full of honest, vulnerable moments as the longtime mates reflect on what it is to be single in their 30s and 40s (“I’m a Cancer, there were a lot of tears,” Brynley tells The Spinoff). By end of their adventure, Brynley reckons her heart was full in ways she wasn’t expecting.

“I was a bit of a cynic going into the show, saying ‘I don’t really need to find love, it’s just a TV gig, I don’t really care,’,” she says. “By the end of it, I was like, ‘oh gosh, how nice is love?’”

Since Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club began, Stent says they’ve had “a beautiful mix” of responses from both singles and coupled-up people. There’s also been an unexpected side-effect for their love lives. “It’s weirdly become one giant ad for us both being single. You get the slide-ins of the DMs like, ‘hey, you’ve actively told everyone you’re looking for love, so here I am’.” Even My Life in TV couldn’t resist getting in touch, and asked Brynley all about her earliest TV crush, her love for a 90s dinnertime puppet and what it was like to send The Bachelor packing.

My earliest TV memory is… Sesame Street. The song that’s been etched into my brain for all eternity is that ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12’ song. I was born at the very tail end of the 80s, so I’m a Sesame Street girl through and through, especially when it was the dark days. It was originally kind of grungy, not as colourful and flashy as it is now. It was kind of creepy. Mr Snuffelupagus looked scary.

The TV show I used to rush home from school to watch was… Pokémon. I was a huge Pokémon fan, and me and my brother were very close in age and we had to compromise around television. There was a lot of “well, we can watch Powerpuff Girls, as long as we watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after that…”

My early TV crush was… Uncle Jesse from Full House, and this is very bisexual of me, but there were these two Android characters from Dragon Ball Z, a boy and a girl, and I found them both really hot. They were called Android 18 and 17.

The TV moment that haunts me is… An episode from Goosebumps called The Haunted Mask, where a girl puts a scary mask on her face. I’ve never been able to unsee that image.

The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about was… Getti, the spaghetti monster from the 90s. I just love him. I think he had fingerless gloves on, which is very confusing. He partially scared me, and partially I was enamoured by him because I love kooky creatures.

My TV guilty pleasure is… RuPaul’s Drag Race, without a doubt. It’s just a bunch of drag queens kind of going at each other. It’s so formulaic and so camp and trashy in the best possible way.

My most watched TV show of all time is… Friends. I used to go to sleep to it during drama school. I had this tiny little box TV that my grandparents sent up with me from Christchurch that had a DVD player built in, and every night I would put Friends on and fall asleep. I know it like the back of my hand, but I would say it’s now probably a guilty pleasure, considering it’s about six white people living in America at a very different time, with some questionable homophobic jokes peppered through it.

My favorite TV moment from my own career is… Sending Art Green home on Celebrity Treasure Island. It’s not that I don’t love Art. I love Art so much, but I was such an underdog in that season. I didn’t even know what I could do. I was like “I’m going to go home first”. Art was this behemoth in the competition, the favourite to win, everybody loves Art Green. He’s this huge, buff dude, and when I won, me and Chris Parker just looked at each other in shock. We couldn’t believe that this relatively unknown comedian sent home THE Art Green, the hottest man alive.

The funniest TV show of all time is… The one that makes me laugh the most is the Saturday Night Live Women’s Special with all the past female performers of SNL. They show highlights of their old sketches and do new sketches together. I’ve watched that so many times because it just makes me laugh so much. It’s got the old Debbie Downer sketch in it where they all corpse on national television.

brynley and kura laughing on a couch in a sparsely decorated student flat. behind them is a poster for a drum and bass gig — Photo: Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club

My favourite TV project that I’ve ever been involved with is… Taskmaster NZ, without a doubt, with an honourable mention to Funny Girls, which gave me my foot into the industry. Taskmaster is fun because you’re encouraged to fail. It’s like you can’t put a foot wrong, because your failure can be a success, depending on how everyone else does. You get paid to turn up and play games all day, and then watch it all back with your friends and laugh. It was my dream come true. It’s sad I can never do it again.

The TV show I loved and wished I was involved with is… Succession. I think the acting and writing is absolutely insane. I could have played some rich cousin coming in there, being a bitch.

The funniest person on television is… Kura Forrester, without a doubt. I know I’m biased, but she makes me laugh the most. If we’re going international, I probably laugh the most at Kristen Wiig from Saturday Night Live and beyond.

The TV show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to, is… Breaking Bad. I feel stubborn because so many people have told me to watch it that now I’ve got to see how long I can live in this life without ever watching Breaking Bad. But I hear it’s great.

The last thing I watched on television was… Severance. It’s really good. I skipped last week, so I got to watch two episodes back to back, and it was a real treat.

Watch Bryn and Ku’s Singles Club here. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

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A man wearing a black jacket and a woman wearing a blue down jacket stand closely to each other in a forest and look directly at the camera

Richard Flood and Acushla-Tara Kupe star in The Gone (Photo: TVNZ)

Pop CultureFebruary 28, 2025

The Gone is back with another moody mystery – but is that enough?

Tara Ward

Staff writer

Richard Flood and Acushla-Tara Kupe star in The Gone (Photo: TVNZ)

New Zealand crime thriller The Gone returns for a second season – with more missing Irish tourists.

This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.

Theo Richter is standing in a hut deep in the New Zealand bush, staring out the window. An animal skeleton lies next to his feet, the building peppered with bullet holes. The Irish detective points out a blood stain on a window frame to his colleague Diana Huia. “Looks like the only way out,” he growls out the window, even though the detectives came in two different doors. The camera pulls back to reveal acres of native bush in front of them. “She’s out there,” Richter broods, no doubt adding every New Zealand tree to his list of internal demons.

Welcome back to the murderous new season of The Gone, the award-winning Irish-New Zealand crime thriller that returned to TVNZ this week. In 2023, The Gone won five gongs at the NZTV Awards, including best drama, and screened in Aotearoa, Ireland and the UK. The first season followed the investigation into two Irish tourists who went missing from the fictional New Zealand town of Mount Affinity, a case that echoed another local unsolved crime from 17 years earlier.

This season? More Irish visitors go missing. Which is why Detective Richter (Grey’s Anatomy’s Richard Flood) hasn’t left the country yet, having arrived in season one to assist DS Huia (Acushla-Tara Kupe) with finding the young tourists. The search for Sinead and Ronan also drew the interest of Irish investigative journalist Aileen Ryan, who, as the new season begins, has herself gone missing after arranging to meet a contact about the unsolved “goat man” murders from years ago.

A man wearing a black jacket and a woman wearing a blue police vest walk together in a scene from NZ TV drama The Gone — Photo: TVNZ

The first episode of season two delivers the same slow, moody murder mystery that feels like a cross between One Lane Bridge and The Brokenwood Mysteries. The heavy atmosphere is captured in beautiful, sweeping shots of a landscape covered in dense forest and low, looming clouds, and the pace remains unhurried. The dialogue can be a little clunky, but Kupe gives another strong performance as Diana, and is once again surrounded by a talented supporting cast that includes Vanessa Rare, Miriama Smith, Michelle Fairey and Matt Whelan.

On the face of it, The Gone is a standard crime drama that follows two detectives as they piece together an unusual disappearance. One is a brooding but brilliant loner who’s hiding many secrets, the other a cop returning home to confront the ghosts of her past. The troubled detective has become a cliched trope in crime drama – think Broadchurch, Rebus, True Detective, Strike, Unforgotten – and The Gone’s lead characters tread a familiar path worn with sadness, secrets and long stares into the distance.

But what elevates The Gone are the unique New Zealand stories woven throughout. This is a rural community where hurt runs generations deep, and storylines about big business acquiring Māori land and the legacy of colonialism make the show feel current and relevant. The trouble is that these secondary storylines are more interesting than the disappearances the show hinges on, and the characters involved – like Buster (Wayne Hapi) and Rare’s Wiki – are more complex and richly-drawn than the detectives at the helm of the show.

In fact, I found myself wishing that The Gone could ditch the Irish connection altogether, and simply be a thriller about a young Māori detective returning to her home town. This kind of multi-country production is becoming more common as television gets harder to fund, but the collaboration waters down The Gone from being a dynamic, challenging thriller that tells stories only we can tell. In a world where troubled detectives are a dime a dozen, is The Gone selling itself short?

The Gone screens on Tuesdays on TVNZ1 at 8.30pm and streams on TVNZ+.