Photo: SPP / Design: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureMarch 11, 2025

In trying to save its life, has Shortland Street lost its heart?

Staff writer

Photo: SPP / Design: Tina Tiller

New Zealand’s favourite soap returned this year with a new look and a new attitude – but is it working?

This year, Shortland Street has rewritten its own rules. After falling advertising revenue saw the long-running series reduce to three episode a week in 2025, the show returned to our screens last month not as a soap about the lives and loves of a community of people living in Ferndale, but as a bold and confident medical drama set entirely within the hospital walls.

Shortland Street head writer Jessica Joy Wood told The Spinoff earlier this year that the show wanted to deliver more compelling drama with new levels of intensity, and would focus more on medical cases that unfold across the week. The result is a fast-paced series with stylish camerawork that darts around the ED as overworked staff rush to save lives. Doctors spend scenes rattling off medical terminology, patients deal with life-changing diagnoses, and a soundtrack of up and coming New Zealand artists gives the show a contemporary, edgy feel.

As a TV show, it’s never looked better. If Shortland Street wanted to become New Zealand’s own version of The Resident or The Pitt, they’ve nailed it.

But as a longtime fan, I’ve found this new level of sustained heavy drama hard to watch over the past few weeks. Having already absorbed 12 hours of shitty real-life stories in what experts call “the news”, I’ve struggled to sit down at the end of the day and watch a child being diagnosed with cancer, or parents choosing whether to operate on their baby in utero, or a patient sobbing in her bed due to a lack of treatment options.

This new intensity is relentless. One medical crisis follows another as victims are wheeled into ED, staff bicker and surgeries go awry, over and over again. There’s little humour to balance the suffering and everyone is grumpy, possibly because they don’t have homes to go to. The sets of the characters’ houses have been replaced by new medical sets, which means there’s no escaping the hospital. Almost every scene is filmed in or around the hospital, from the CEO’s balcony to the ambulance bay. One scene even featured doctors sitting between two skip bins.

It’s both the slickest and the bleakest Shortland Street has ever been. The show feels glossy and modern, but staff are stressed and the patients are miserable. What I wouldn’t give for Leanne to return from the dead, bursting into the ED for a couple of lively laps around the sick and dying so she can get her daily step count up.

Has this new approach worked? We’re only one month into Shortland Street’s new season, but figures from TVNZ reveal that Shortland Street was the top scripted show on TVNZ+ for February and the second most watched show on TVNZ2 in the year to date. But for the first three weeks of 2025, Shortland Street reached 95,000 accounts on TVNZ+, a decline from 106,000 accounts for the same time period in 2024. Feedback online is mixed. “I’m trying really hard to get into the swing of it,” one fan wrote recently on the Shortland Street Facebook page, while another declared that “if I wanted to see all the sour faces I would have stayed at work”.

Other TV soaps are facing similar challenges to Shortland Street as viewing habits change, ratings decline and advertising revenue reduces. In the UK, Emmerdale and Coronation Street will soon reduce episodes from one hour to 30 minutes (with episodes screening digitally first), while last year, Hollyoaks cut back its weekly episodes and jumped its timeline forward an entire year to reinvent the drama. Across the Tasman, Australian soap Neighbours will end (again) in December after Amazon withdrew its funding.

These shows have also increased their intensity in an effort to retain viewers. Emmerdale’s recent storyline about the murder of a sexual abuser was quickly followed by the deaths of three characters when a limo drove into a lake. In just one week, Coronation Street covered cancer, organ failure, elder abuse, fraud and kidnapping, while Eastenders celebrated its 40th anniversary with an explosive live episode that killed off one of the show’s longest-running characters. “It feels like everyone’s dying or dead or dying all over again,” said Coro’s Abi, who just had a nervous breakdown after seeing a ghost on an ambulance stretcher.

Someone page Doctor Love, because all this heavy drama may have created a life-threatening side effect for the genre. In their efforts to create endlessly gripping television, soaps have moved away from the very things that made them appealing in the first place: connection, escape, comfort, warmth. Character-driven storylines have been replaced by a torrent of dark events that flood our screens with misery. When that’s all there is, it’s not fun to watch, and surely impossible to sustain.

There’s no doubt Shortland Street returned this year with a bang, keen to prove that it can produce quality television, no matter the challenges. It’s always been the little soap that could, and can be rightfully proud of how it has always evolved to meet the changing audiences in Aotearoa over the past 33 years. But Shortland Street also used to be an escape from the everyday world filled with colour and fun, and now it may well be in danger of overdosing on its own adrenaline.

Shortland Street screens on TVNZ2 on Monday-Wednesday at 7pm and streams on TVNZ+.

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a blue stage with characters dancin, all leaning to the side with a shadowy blue light from the theatre behind them

Dancing and music are a strength of the play, just like the title promises (Image: Andi Crown)

Pop CultureMarch 10, 2025

A Mixtape for Maladies review: Dancing, love, and the Sri Lankan civil war

Shanti Mathias

Contributing writer

Dancing and music are a strength of the play, just like the title promises (Image: Andi Crown)

The third of Ahi Kurnaharan’s ‘epic trilogy’ of plays is beautiful to look at and listen to.

Can the songs we listen to tell us stories about our lives? This is essentially the premise of A Mixtape for Maladies, a show currently playing at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, until March 23. The set-up is simple: Deepan (Shaan Kesha) has discovered an old mixtape of his mother Sangeeta’s (Ambika GKR), from when she was a teenager in Sri Lanka at the start of the Sri Lankan civil war. An aspiring podcaster, Deepan convinces his mother to listen to the music with him; the staging then moves from Deepan and adult Sangeetha, on the right side of the stage, to musicians on the left, with scenes from Sangeetha’s childhood playing out with musical interludes. Each song is linked to a particular memory.

A Mixtape for Maladies, which is playing as part of the Auckland Arts Festival, is written by Ahilan Karunaharan, a Sri Lankan New Zealand playwright and actor. He performs the role of Rajan, Sangeetha’s father, in the show. According to the programme, this is the last of his “epic trilogy” of plays exploring Sri Lankan and New Zealand heritage, following TEA and The Mourning After.

an actor with brown skin in shorts and suspenders leans to the side in a jazzy position with a keyboard player and violinist behind him and the stage lights shining — Bala Murali Shingade plays Suthan, Vishwanathan’s friend (Image: Andi Crown)

While interwoven with the violent history of the Sri Lankan civil war, A Mixtape for Maladies only rarely touches on this directly. After all, even when trouble is brewing and your father keeps hosting political meetings in the back room, there are still crushes to be had, brothers to tease and fairs to attend. That this is a family who deeply love and care for each other is clear. I loved the recurrent scenes of Tiahli Martyn and Ravikanth Gurunathan, as Sangeeta’s sister Subbalaxmi and brother Vishwanathan respectively, looking at each other in exasperation as their sister ditches them to spend more time with Anton (Bala Murali Shingade), her secret boyfriend. At these moments, it really felt like I’d been invited into a village in northern Sri Lanka, one of the family. There for the cotton candy and bickering; there, too for frantic and frightening phone calls, sorrow seeping into the living room, into the old record player.

The first half of the show did start to feel formulaic; scene, song, commentary from Deepan and Sangeetha; scene, song, commentary. The set formula became more appealing when the actors started breaking it. There’s something electrifying in seeing Vishwanathan (Ravikanth Gurunathan) bound across the stage to sing a very angry version of La Bamba after a fight with his father. And perhaps the most poignant moment in the show is when the present day Sangeetha, having slipped into the past where she is saying goodbye to her sister for the last time, calls out “Pause, rewind,” replaying the embrace against scratchy sound effects.

As Sangeetha’s past and present selves mix on stage, Ambika’s acting strengths shine. That bewildered grieving, a past revealed that she doesn’t want to face again. I loved how the costuming played with these different versions of her self: teenage Sangeetha (Gemma-Jayde Naidoo) wears a vibrant sari, has her hair pulled back, while adult Sangeetha wears a casual, loose house dress, seems more unsure. I admired the range of emotion Ambika brought to her adult character, which went far beyond the simple tension of “I don’t want to tell you about my past because then I’d have to tell you everything” that she presents to her son.

blue stage lights and a house set up with five characters in different colourful outfits dancing together — In one scene, Sangeetha dances with her past self and family (Image: Andi Crown)

Deepan, Sangeetha’s son (Shaan Kesha), is meant to be a sort of representative for the audience. He knows just the bare facts about the conflict that he can recite to prompt a reaction out of his mother (and educate the audience, as most people in New Zealand know very little about Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war). Despite his ability to list musicians’ names (one of the weakest parts of the script) he has somehow never asked his mother to tell him more about how the war that killed at least 100,000 civilians affected her family. The best part of their relationship was a brief, joking argument over whether he should go to the temple more or get a better job, compared to another friend whose mother pays for his petrol. I wished that Kesha had been given more material to work with than simply being asked to react to things or state the obvious (ie. “but if that hadn’t happened you wouldn’t have moved to New Zealand and I wouldn’t be here”).

The play brushes against big topics. Why does Subbalaximi prefer to listen to music in Hindi and English, rather than Sinhala or Tamil? Why is “world music” a category that is so often its own silo, separated from popular music performed by English speakers? How do structures of religion like temples and churches unite communities, both in Sri Lanka and in the diaspora? What does it mean when those religious buildings are being bombed during conflict?

While I could glimpse these broad, interesting ideas within the script, the story mostly ends up focusing on closer to home stuff. “Everyone had a secret boyfriend back then” is a delightful provocation, especially when two characters actually do get secret boyfriends (played by the same actor, Shingade). I especially loved the dynamic between Gurunathan, as bouncy Vishwanathan, and Martyn and Naidoo as his sisters. Their family relationship is so strong that I felt like much of the more didactic aspects of the script, listing particular casualties in the war, musicians’ names or, for that matter, advice on making the perfect playlist could have been skipped entirely, to allow more nuanced interactions between different generations of a family.

Yet overall, some of these weaknesses in the script and staging can be ignored in favour of overall coherence and spectacle. The music is stunning, particularly Seyorn Arunagirnathan’s Carnatic violin. It’s so exciting to see a performance in Auckland where music is so integrated, especially music in a different language, and the actors do some incredible singing and dancing. Despite covering heavy subjects, A Mixtape for Maladies is often funny and tender, and left me wanting to wear more saris and learn more about the Sri Lankan civil war.