Tara Ward watches the new TVNZ documentary (datamentary?) series.
What’s all this, then?
Counting The Beat is a new four-part documentary series that started on TVNZ this week. Presented by Tāmati Rimene-Sproat, the series takes a variety of official information generated in our daily lives and pulls it together to find out who we really are. “There are five million of us, and what we eat, search, buy and flush, it’s all data – and it’s all telling the stories,” Rimene-Sproat says in the show’s introduction.
But don’t worry – rather than being filled with dry numbers and boring facts, Counting The Beat introduces us to the people behind the statistics. Episode one focuses on money (future episodes look at love and family, community, and health) as Rimene-Sproat traverses the motu from Lawrence to Tauranga to meet the drinkers embracing craft beer, the scientists testing our wastewater, and a city councillor concerned about gambling. It’s a human study that brings the numbers to life – a walking, talking census, if you will – which captures how diverse and multifaceted we are as a nation.
What’s good?
Counting The Beat’s vibe is light and humorous, with Rimene-Sproat bringing warmth and self-deprecation to every interview. He kicks things off by introducing us to Marisa, who belongs to the one percent of New Zealanders who hold over $7.9 million in assets and earn at least $456,365 in annual income. Marisa lives in a beautiful home with a pool she rarely uses, and isn’t phased by spending $6.99 on pomegranate quills at Farro.
Marisa is also part of the 25% of New Zealanders who feel uncomfortable talking about money, so it’s a sharp contrast when we next meet the energetic Shawn of Whanganui and watch him do his weekly grocery shop at Pak’nSave – with a budget of $50. Like 40% of all New Zealanders, Shawn earns under $30,000 a year, and his painstakingly careful budgeting and creative cooking is a stark reminder of where the cost of living crisis is hitting hardest.
This is why Counting The Beat feels so current and timely: it tells us that 52% of New Zealanders are eating differently because of increasing costs, and that the country had one of the biggest increases globally in food basics costs in 2023 (56%).
Episode one covers a lot of ground – jobs, home-ownership, the gender wage gap, wastewater analysis of our alcohol consumption – but some of the bleakest facts come during a discussion about gambling. New Zealanders gamble $2.7 billion a year, most of it occurring in areas of medium to high deprivation. Porirua is the country’s biggest gambling centre, with residents spending up to $105,000 on a single pokie machine every year. “You could not think of a better machine that was designed to suck money from people who have the least,” worried Porirura councillor Geoff Hayward says. (Awkwardly, the live Wednesday night Lotto draw popped up during a TVNZ1 ad break.)
Thankfully, there’s plenty of humour and charm to balance out the depressing bits. We’re changing as a nation: oat milk purchases have gone up 1000% in five years, we’ve spurned celery for spinach, and we drink half the amount of beer that we did 40 years ago. Rimene-Sproat spends twice as much as other New Zealanders on his haircuts, and a big round of applause should go to Counting the Beat for pulling off the rarest of feats: making talking about the Consumer Price Index actually interesting.
What’s not so good?
Counting the Beat has a great pace and covers a lot of different topics, so don’t expect a deep dive into the statistics – but there was one moment when I wished they’d gone below the surface and pulled up more detail. Self-employed women living in the Bay of Plenty earn twice the average hourly rate as in the rest of the country, but the data didn’t explain why (“maybe it’s the networking?” Rimene-Sproat wondered). Is Tauranga really the nation’s business networking capital for women? Tell me more, preferably during an after-work event involving canapes and unique value propositions.
The verdict: Watch it
My own unofficial data suggests that we’re 100% a nation of nosy parkers, fascinated with finding out how other people live their lives. Counting The Beat taps into that obsession, and while it should be creepy to realise that someone is collecting data on everything we do – even what we poop – Counting the Beat presents this information in a non-terrifying way to help us better understand who we really are. Crucially, there’s no judgement here. In a time where it feels like New Zealanders are more divided than ever, Counting the Beat reminds us of all the things we still have in common.
