Tara Ward reflects on an Outrageous week on The Spinoff.
This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.
On 12 July, 2005, Outrageous Fortune burst onto our screens and transformed the landscape of New Zealand television. Created by Rachel Lang and James Griffin, the big, bold comedy-drama ran for six award-winning seasons and 108 episodes following the unpredictable exploits of the Wests, a family of career criminals living in West Auckland. It wasn’t easy for the Wests to go straight, and Outrageous captured the attention and affection of New Zealanders in a way that no local scripted series had before.
The Spinoff spent this week celebrating the 20th anniversary of Outrageous Fortune, and it’s been a delightful trip down TV memory lane. We began on Monday with my cover story about how the Wests were born, and how the show was inspired by a news report that writer Rachel Lang heard in the shower one morning in 2003. I’d always thought Outrageous Fortune was an instant success, but it turns out New Zealand audiences were a tough crowd. It took three seasons before our love affair with Outrageous truly blossomed, and the show proved critics wrong over and over again.
Across six dramatic seasons, Outrageous burrowed into our national consciousness in a variety of unexpected and colourful ways. I loved Alex Casey’s deep dive into the show’s spectacular use of swearing, while Liam Rātana took us on a thoughtful trip through Outrageous Fortune’s most defining and memorable moments. Gareth Shute explored how the show championed a variety of iconic, sometimes forgotten New Zealand music, and Emma Gleason unpacked the unique style of our favourite Westies in all their leather and leopard-print glory. Tomorrow, actor Siobhan Marshall (who played Pascalle West) ends the week by taking us through her life in television.
The legacy of Outrageous Fortune runs deep – even now, it’s hard to see someone wearing leopard print without thinking of Cheryl West (and if you’re wondering how obsessed New Zealand was with the show, check out this impressive 2010 entry for a Cheryl-lookalike competition in Ashburton). Outrageous Fortune inspired the award-winning prequel series Westside, and several of the show’s cast and crew went on to achieve international success, including Antony Starr (The Boys, Banshee) and Robyn Malcolm, who most recently starred in the BAFTA-nominated After the Party and Netflix global hit drama The Survivors.
Rewatching Outrageous Fortune reminded me that aspects of the show remain as relevant today as they were in 2005. “In our real world, we are all encouraged to think that if we just try hard enough and show initiative, we can all be rich and famous,” Lang and Griffin wrote in their original Outrageous pitch. Twenty years later, everyone from politicians to influencers to the media remind us that we too can be wealthy and successful, if we only try hard enough.
Lang was inspired to create Outrageous Fortune after she learned the median income for New Zealand women in 2003 was just over $14,000. The week before I spoke to Lang about that memory, the government rushed through changes to pay equity laws, which will predominantly impact the incomes of working-class women. Two decades may have passed, but some things haven’t changed.
Outrageous Fortune is a New Zealand television success story, a show filled with our voices, our issues and our humour. It’s been a joy to spend a week remembering and celebrating the series. Once you’ve read all our Outrageous Week pieces, do yourself a favour – take a trip back to 2005 and enjoy a West family reunion this weekend.
Watch Outrageous Fortune on TVNZ+ or on the Outrageous Fortune YouTube channel.
