Tara Ward watches the first few days of the new ThreeNews era.

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The city of New York has just discovered wheelie bins, and the news has sent ThreeNews anchor Samantha Hayes into a hearty case of the giggles. “I remember getting wheelie bins in Milton when I was a kid,” Hayes laughs to weather presenter Heather Keats, who seems as equally as bemused by the march of progress across one of the world’s biggest cities. It’s nearing the end of ThreeNews’ fifth ever news bulletin, and they’ve saved the weirdest story for last: America now has rubbish bins.

We’re nearly a week into the ThreeNews era, now produced by Stuff after 35 years of being made by Three and Newshub, and the ratings are going well. Figures provided by Warner Bros. Discovery show that Saturday’s edition received an average of 19.3% of viewers aged 25-54 (up from 15.7% over the last quarter), and an increase of 89% on the week prior in the 5+ age demographic. Live streams were also up 19% on the previous four week average.

Saturday night’s inaugural bulletin was sleek, shiny and very, very purple. Now with a few more bulletins under its belt, how has ThreeNews fared during its longer one-hour weekday editions – and how many wheelie-bin stories are too many?

Breaking news: it’s still purple. Former Newshub presenter Samantha Hayes was in the anchor seat on Monday, and kicked off ThreeNews’ first weekday bulletin with her typical warmth and professionalism. Along with fellow former Newshub journalists like Laura Tupou, Jenna Lynch, Juliet Speedy and Tova O’Brien, Hayes appears to have shifted seamlessly across to ThreeNews. The experience of the ex-Newshub team is critical to this new news being taken seriously, and it feels like we’re in safe hands.

Each edition this week covered a variety of local, national and international stories, from the prime minister’s visit to the Nato summit to some annoying Canada geese in Canterbury to Lulu Sun’s Wimbledon tournament. ThreeNews also ventured beyond the studio, reporting from parliament, travelling to Spain for a live interview with Team New Zealand’s Grant Dalton and crossing live to Tova O’Brien in Washington DC – or as it was accidentally called, “Barcellona”.

So far, it feels like ThreeNews is covering all its bases, but understandably, there’s still a few things to be fine tuned. A sports interview on Monday night was filmed with a camera that moved so much I felt seasick. Saturday’s exclusive interview with a Whakatāne gang leader popped up again on Tuesday, and featured much of the same content. There were also some lighter items towards the end of each edition that felt out of place, like footage of a Cornwall ice-cream van floating out to sea or John Cena announcing his wrestling retirement, or the aforementioned wheelie bins.

And no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop trying to work out where the floor ends and begins during Heather Keats’ pixellated weather report. That green screen has got me good, and while it’s a tad more obvious when Simon Dallow is pretending to be in outer space, it’s unnerving that I can’t work out which parts of the ThreeNews studio are real and which parts aren’t.

Clearly, ThreeNews is still working out who it wants to be, and who it really is. It’s doing the basics well, delivering the essential news with energy and authority and keeping us informed on international events, but there’s no doubt this is a move of extremely high stakes. Stuff promised innovation and freshness, but will its nightly interactive polls, ad-break quiz questions and mystifying set be enough of a point of difference to retain viewers, and ideally, draw them over from TVNZ? For ThreeNews’ sake, I wheelie, wheelie hope so.

ThreeNews screens on Three every night at 6pm and streams on ThreeNow.