The gang’s all here

Pop CultureOctober 8, 2019

Put on your time-travelling culottes and get ready: a new Outlander trailer is here

Staff writer

The gang’s all here

Big news for Outlander fans – the trailer for the new season of your favourite sexy time-travelling drama just landed. Outlander recapper Tara Ward tries to decipher what season five may bring.

Friends, it’s time to dance around the room like we are Jamie Fraser eating figs at Hogmanay. The first trailer for season five of Outlander was released yesterday, which means we have escaped the dark Droughtlander wilderness and are heading towards the ginger light, arms splayed open, ready to embrace whatever awaits us. We are one step closer to reuniting with Jamie and Claire and their hat-eating pig, which makes me as happy as a hat-eating pig eating a hat.

Our favourite time-travelling drama returns on February 16, 2020, which is so close you can almost taste it. It probably tastes a bit funky, to be fair, because when we last saw Roger he hadn’t washed for approximately three hundred years. Still, these are the burdens us time travellers must bear. Sweaty historians and exploding hernias, all for the love of this.

There is nothing I love more than breaking an Outlander trailer down, frame by frame, curl by curl, studying every furrowed brow and sultry stare for any deeper meaning about what might lay ahead for us. I’m about to squeeze that delicious one-minute trailer like it’s a soggy facecloth and I am Jamie Fraser giving his wife a sponge bath in a forest. I will wring this puppy of every juicy drop of goodness until all we’re left with is the damp detritus of the Fraser’s unyeilding love and a wet patch where their hopes and dreams used to be.

Because spoiler alert, things are tense in 1769.

If you thought that now the Frasers were back together, and Brianna and Roger had their baby, and Murtagh and Jocasta were rutting like teenagers, that this would be a chilled out season where Jamie and Claire spent their days getting drunk on moonshine and making wild love in a field of strawberries, then I’m sorry. You’ll have to cosplay that sort of wild fanfiction in your own home, because this is sixty seconds of Jamie and Claire looking worried, of guns waved around willy nilly, of bad moods and bad tempers, and worst of all, Roger being a total downer about living in another time and place.

Roger, Roger, Roger. First the knickerbockers, now this.

Look, at the rate our own world is imploding we’ll all be heading through the stones ASAP, so it doesn’t matter how angsty this season looks. We are trapped in our own Idiot Hut of Outlander adoration, so prepare the horses and adjust your tricorn, here’s what we know about season five of Outlander.

The Frasers are ready to rumble

“The Frasers will fight time, space and history to protect their family”. Not sure what exactly that involves, but I’m picking it’s on like 18th century Donkey Kong.

The wigs are so beautiful I want to cry

Look, I’ve said it before and I will say it again, but let us all join hands and breathe in the silky wonder of these new and improved wigs. So tasty I could eat them, so soft I could burrow down and build a home where I would live like it was a cave and I was a lonely Highlander with only a husk of a soul to keep me company.

The gang’s all here

Murtagh, Lord John and Jocasta all pop up, plus I’m also 87% sure I saw Ghost Frank riding sidesaddle on a riverbank. Frank! Fraaaaaaaaaank!

But there was no Stephen Bonnet

YET.

It’s awash in a tsunami of emotion

There’s lots of excited shouting and wobbly double chins, and that was just me after I watched the trailer for the first time.

Roger is homesick for the future

Sure, his father-in-law beat him to a pulp and sold him as a slave, but they don’t even have climate change in 1769. Sort your shit out Roge, and plant some trees while you’re at it.

They’re preparing for battle

Just a hunch, after Jamie yelled out “prepare for battle”.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is the present, that’s why it’s a gift

How are the Frasers supposed to have happy tent sex when Claire knows another war is about to kick off? Roger wants to go back, Jamie thinks the future is safer (LOL), and Claire has perfected her pensive ‘it’s all my fault we’re in this terrible mess’ stare. Live, laugh, love, Frasers.

Claire continues to save the world, one exploding hernia at a time

Doctoring, witchcraft, whatever. It’s all going to end in tears, probably mine, because I’m still not over that time Claire just sawed off a man’s arm in a pub back in season one.

“History be damned”

HERSTORY, am I right, Dame Claire Fraser?

Catch up on all of Tara Ward’s Outlander recaps here.

Keep going!

My Restaurant Rules is the most compelling New Zealand reality show of the year.

Pop CultureOctober 7, 2019

Review: My Restaurant Rules is Michelin-starred local reality TV

Duncan Greive

Founder

My Restaurant Rules is the most compelling New Zealand reality show of the year.

The seething passions of small-town restaurants explode in TVNZ 2’s new cooking show.

Like so many new reality TV formats, My Restaurant Rules sounds like a genre parody, and not even a particularly clever one. Just as Seven Year Switch (couples switch partners to revive their relationships) is a bleak Married at First Sight ripoff, so My Restaurant Rules seems a cynical home brand version of My Kitchen Rules.

Yet as with most aspects of reality television, the format and even the intention of the creators matter far less than the casting – and that’s the heart of what makes this such an appealing proposition. Based on a moribund Australian format, and changed enough (the original saw participants starting their own restaurant) that it could be its own thing entirely, My Restaurant Rules sees five duos from ‘neighbourhood restaurants’ around the country compete to wow each other, and judges Colin Fassnidge and Judith Tabron, with the winner taking home a $100,000 prize. The clincher is that the show is on the road, with the cast travelling to one another’s restaurants, and working as hectic duos together in the kitchen. It’s high stress, and brings the drama.

The judges of *My Restaurant Rules*, Colin Fassnidge and Judith Tabron, centre.

The past few years have seen a plethora of romance-based reality shows, which seem to operate according to the following quid pro quo: we will give you some Instagram followers in exchange for a few short weeks of public humiliation. They have, naturally, encouraged a fairly specific type of participant. Young, attractive, often withholding, manifestly not there for the right reasons. Sometimes they can be wildly entertaining, as on this year’s Married at First Sight Australia. Sometimes they can be heartcrushingly dull, as on this year’s Married at First Sight NZ.

The cast of My Restaurant Rules self-select as being there for exactly the right reasons, in that they already own and operate restaurants. Rather than being thrust together by the show, the duos have long-established interpersonal dynamics, which tend to be much more fun to watch than the awkward, stagey interactions of just-mets.

The first episode saw us dine at Rustic, a ‘shabby chic’ (a term which was to become controversial, somehow, in episode two) bistro in Waioru. Run by head chef Tyson and his adoring and adorable mum Denise, they served up a menu including ribs, mussels and fish with pan-fried gnocchi. The latter proved controversial with an Italian team, who are notable in bringing the only woman chef of the group. Raf, the Italian front-of-house, later provided one of the more extraordinary moments of the first pair of episodes when he told a shocked table that women were unsuitable for customer contact for “eight to eleven” days a month.

That he was roundly shouted down by the rest of the table showed one of the many positive functions of reality TV – these unscripted moments in which real people reveal themselves in a constrained environment allow us to map the social progress of the nation. Raf’s comment would have been uncontroversial 30 years ago; today it was arresting. Small mercies, but still.

Dan (NZ’s first televised purebred emo) and Julia (his wife!).

Next we journeyed to Katikati’s Central Park, where Daniel and Julia awaited us. Daniel might be the first purebred emo to appear on New Zealand reality TV since Scotty Rocker graced Treasure Island well over a decade ago. It was worth the wait. He’s a true and natural creature of the genre, swearing constantly, trashing his wife Julia for his own mistakes and generally serving delicious-looking examples of ‘90s fine dining (think chicken roulade) with a gracelessness that clearly left a sour taste in the mouths of all who consumed it.

By the episode’s end the pair had stretched the meal out for too many hours, and offended everyone at the table, earning a stern and satisfying reprimand from Tabron. It was extremely entertaining, and a window into passions which clearly lurk within small town and suburban restaurants just as they do in more acclaimed inner city counterparts. This is ultimately what My Restaurants Rules is serving, and it’s very, very satisfying.

My Restaurant Rules is on Mondays and Tuesdays at 7.30pm on TVNZ 2, and streaming from 8.30pm the same day on TVNZ OnDemand.