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The cast of Down for Love season two! (Photo: TVNZ+, Image Design: Tina Tiller)
The cast of Down for Love season two! (Photo: TVNZ+, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureOctober 12, 2023

Review: Down For Love shows every other reality dating franchise how it’s done

The cast of Down for Love season two! (Photo: TVNZ+, Image Design: Tina Tiller)
The cast of Down for Love season two! (Photo: TVNZ+, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

It doesn’t pull punches, and it doesn’t exploit its participants. Sam Brooks reviews TV’s most remarkable dating show.

The premise

After a successful (and critically acclaimed) first season, dating show Down For Love returns with another unsentimental yet warm look at the dating lives of people in the Down Syndrome community. This second season catches up with a few previous participants – “contestants” is absolutely not the right word here – while introducing us to plenty of new faces, adding more colour and detail to the spectrum of experience within the community.

Although nominally a dating show, Down For Love thankfully lacks the heavy production and exploitation that you might associate with the format. This isn’t Too Hot to Handle or Love is Blind, where the cast is ambushed by bizarre rule changes and technical challenges. It’s not an experiment, or a chance to laugh at people. It’s opening the curtains, inviting us into a world we might not have any understanding of.

The good

It goes without saying that a show like Down For Love treats its cast with as much respect and care (you can read more about that in Alex Casey’s story about the first season and Attitude, the production company behind the show), and that is a net good for the world. The more that the diversity we see in our onscreen worlds reflects the diversity that exists in the IRL world, the better.

Where the series differs from other dating shows, however, is that the cast aren’t in enclosed environments, surrounded by cameras and producers. The audience gets a sense of each cast member’s life outside of the dates, like Clayton’s home life in the small West Coast town of Karamea, where he sells sunflowers at the weekend markets. We see how he interacts with his family, the world around him, and get to properly know him before he even goes on a date to begin with. It’s a clever, and wise, choice, because it means we’re that much more invested in whether or not those dates go well.

Respect doesn’t mean handling with kid gloves, though – because those dates don’t always go well! Respect means looking subjects in the eye and regarding them honestly. It’s not just the lens of Down For Love that does this, but the individual choices – moments like showing Chloe wringing her hands before her blind date go-karting with Nathan, or Saione and Lily missing a connection initially on their first date at a tree-top obstacle course but then, eventually, finding that spark. It shows that, shockingly, you can make dramatic, compelling television without sacrificing or disrespecting the humanity of the people on screen.

Down For Love participant Lily Mae at the zoo. (Photo: Supplied)

The frame that the show puts around the cast is crucial to why it works. Down For Love isn’t invested in the success of couples, necessarily, but it is crucially invested in letting the cast be independent adults, who can (and do) decide what will work for them and what doesn’t. Without ever feeling like it’s pulling on the strings of production, or overly manipulating the heartstrings of the audience, it shows us the cast as real people, rather than subjects to be coddled or have their rough edges sanded down. 

We’re used to seeing the less-than-glamorous sides of people’s feelings on TV, and Down For Love doesn’t shy away from those aspects of the characters either – as in an especially heartbreaking moment where Saione doesn’t understand why Lily hasn’t texted back, and has to have it gently explained to him. He’s hurt and confused, and the series never shies away from that. It’s better for it.

The not-so-good

It is slightly dissonant that the voiceover is done by a conspicuously British (or at least British sounding) lady. It’s not at all bad – she has a lovely, plummy TV voice – but it does disconnect from the show a bit, making it feel less like a dating show and more like a documentary.

The verdict

It’s corny to say that representation matters. Of course it does. But what turns Down For Love from a show that matters into a show that is genuinely great is its approach. It would be easy for this show to be heartwarming and soft. It’s clear that Attitude has no interest in making that show. 

Instead, Down For Love is complex, beautiful, and not always easy to watch – it sucks to see people not quite meet each other in the way that they wanted to. Other dating shows would do well to take notes.

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’
Calum Henderson
— Production editor
Keep going!
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

MediaOctober 12, 2023

How ‘Abstain for the Game’ became one of NZ’s most controversial ad campaigns

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

A lighthearted campaign during the last home Rugby World Cup became an international incident. But why? Duncan Greive reexamines Telecom’s ‘Abstain for the Game’ ad.

You have to remember that 2011 was 12 years ago and New Zealand was a very different country. The All Blacks had been the best team in rugby for most of the preceding 24 years, yet hadn’t won a World Cup since the amateur-era debut in 1987. We derived a frankly embarrassing proportion of our self-worth from our men’s rugby team being good at men’s rugby (and none from the fact our women’s rugby team had won four straight World Cups by that stage). This made us, as a country, really weird and tense and grumpy.

And humourless. How else to explain the response to Abstain for the Game? It was just a cute, silly ad campaign, dreamed up by Saatchi and Saatchi as a way for Telecom (soon to be rebranded Spark) to have some fun with the rugby-mania which gripped the nation. Instead of seeing it for the loose, self-effacing idea it manifestly was, the thing basically blew up on contact, becoming a major news story which hit politics, travelled overseas and saw the whole thing dumped in the blink of an eye.

But to look at it now with fresh eyes it feels almost unimaginable that it took on such an enormously controversial dimension. It opens with a long shot of 90s-era All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick, set against an enormous New Zealand flag, rippling softly in the breeze. He’s driving a pink dodgem shaped like a fist, with a black band featuring the male/female symbols on it prominent on the right hand ring finger. Strings play softly in the background as he heads toward the camera, and they will swell markedly as he begins a stirring, Churchillian speech.

“Thank you,” he says, “you’ve taken the first step towards supporting the All Blacks in the great battle of 2011.” It’s a baffling sentence, context-free. Firstly, he’s congratulating you before you have made any commitment, or even know what is being asked of you. Secondly, due to draconian protections around the phrase “Rugby World Cup”, even sponsors which had an official association with teams or stadia were forbidden from even mentioning the cup unless they also had a sponsorship relationship with the tournament. Hence “great battle”.

From there, it gets considerably more strange. Fitzpatrick was an icon of the game, but as he had moved to the UK years earlier also held something of an exotic quality. To hear him speak at all was interesting. This is what he said: that we were “…selflessly stepping into the bed chambers of this fine country, throwing aside your natural instincts, and lacy lingerie”. He raises his eyebrows knowingly.

The music rose and pulsed, almost aroused. “Go forth, wearing your pledge band with pride, averting your eyes from temptation, and shouting from the rooftop ‘Abstain for the Game’.” He continues, rambling in this unhinged, slightly coy style (there’s text in the corner reading “for grown ups only”), before reversing his off little vehicle, and driving off into the distance. 

It was an era when new brand campaigns from the major New Zealand corporates were intensely scrutinised pieces of pop culture in their own right, and this one had scarcely aired before becoming perhaps the most reviled ad campaign of the new century. RNZ quoted fellow All Blacks captain Brian Lochore as calling it “crass, disgusting and degrading to all New Zealanders”. It was major news in Australia and was covered in Forbes, Bloomberg and USA Today. Prime minister John Key, ever a sharp reader of public opinion, said “I personally think it’s living proof that not every advertising dollar is worth the money spent”.

The idea was intentionally ludicrous on its face. Previous years had brought reporting and research suggesting that male athletes performed better in competition when they refrained from sex in the leadup to major tournaments. The idea was an extension of the “stadium of four million” concept, whereby New Zealanders would take in abstinence in solidarity with their team. The black rubber ring on the car’s finger was to signal their commitment – Fitzpatrick was also wearing one.

The scale of response essentially forced Telecom’s hand. Within days the blast furnace heat had forced them to apologise and abandon the campaign, torching the vast sums expended on creative and production. It became a symbol of the excesses of the ad industry, and proof that its execs were completely disconnected from the sensibilities of ordinary New Zealanders.

Yet to view it now, three world cups on (two of them resulting in All Black victories) and entirely divorced from the firestorm it set off, the campaign takes on a very different feel. It’s completely bonkers, sure, but very endearingly so. The idea that a brand as huge as Telecom would commit so wholeheartedly to something so massively odd and risky makes your heart swell a little. The execution is so earnest yet unavoidably surreal that it seems humiliating that we took it so seriously.

Perhaps the most comforting aspect with hindsight is that for all the heat, it didn’t impact agency Saatchi and Saatchi’s relationship with Telecom. They would stay together for years to come, and even manage the hugely important rebrand to Spark. It suggests that behind the scenes, both the brand and the agency copped the reaction on the chin, and assumed mutual responsibility and not casting about for someone to blame. That’s as it should be. The campaign was not at fault – it was us all along.

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