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 The sets of the characters’ houses have been replaced by new medical sets, which means there’s no escaping the hospital.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+.
