Guy Williams, and the real star of Jono and Ben: New Zealand.
Six years after first arriving on our screens, Jono and Ben air their final episode tonight. In tribute, Dylan Reeve looks back on the best part of the show: Guy Williams’ NZ Today segment.
For a certain group of overseas internet users, New Zealand’s most prominent journalist isn’t who you’d expect. It’s not John Campbell, nor Nicky Hager. Definitely not Mike Hosking. Maybe David Farrier, what with his Dark Touristing and Tickle adventures… But I’m talking about Guy Williams. Yes, that Guy Williams. Williams’ Jono & Ben segment, ‘NZ Today’, has hit the front page of the Reddit’s popular /r/videos with reasonably consistency. For his recent investigation into a 24/7 guppy farming operation in New Lynn, the link’s title was simply: “New Zealand’s top reporter strikes again”.
There’s something special about the short, often absurdist segments Williams produces for the imaginary current affairs show within a show. It’s not just that they’re perfectly constructed to showcase Williams’ understated and self-deprecating humour. There’s a deeper magic.
Most of us, if asked to name the funniest person we could think of, or to recall an incident where we cried with laughter, point to some friend of ours. We’ll think of an event that was so funny that we can’t even remember what it was that made us laugh, just that we laughed so hard it hurt, all because of some weird thing that funny mate said.
Williams takes his often awkward suit jacket and branded microphone into very unpretentious parts of the country, digs into the weird and wonderful things we all know exist around us, and uncovers those hilarious people with perfectly unexpected quips. He finds the funny mates we all know and lets them shine.
The whole show is a joke premise, but the humour is always grounded in our reality. Many of the best moments are thanks to the unassuming Kiwis who find themselves standing in front of the NZ Today cameras. Williams is happy to let those people revel in their jokes, and hang awkwardly when their comedy doesn’t quite land.
In the case of Issac and Josh from Marton, Williams even pivoted his entire segment around two interesting and funny locals when the main story didn’t turn out to be all he’d imagined.
Beyond being a semi-satirical current affairs segment, NZ Today is a fantastic showcase for people, places and events that feel familiar to us. “What I learned was as long as there was a small town involved you basically couldn’t fuck it up,” says Williams about the talent and stories he’s discovered.
There’s a weird charm and sense of comfort to watching unmistakably New Zealand characters being themselves on TV with no pretension. Even more wonderful (and surprising) is seeing overseas viewers react the same way on Reddit and YouTube, places where comments are often best avoided.
“Reddit Videos has been so great,” says Williams. “To do well on Reddit has been a real boost, not just the viewership but the lovely compliments [from everyone] has been awesome.
“I literally prepped Issac and Josh from Marton before the segment played to not read the comments and it was an awesome surprise to see that they were almost universally loved!”
NZ Today is a masterpiece of both comedy and current affairs, and it’s sad to see it go. Hopefully it might find its way back to our screens in the future in some new incarnation – the NZ On Air tagline ‘our stories, our voices’ could just as easily be the tagline of NZ Today. The show has done a fantastic jobs of putting New Zealand stories and New Zealand voices front and centre – and here’s the best five of them, for posterity’s sake:
5. The Greymouth Boat Crash
This is the segment that launched NZ Today. A short video of a dude in Greymouth crashing his boat into a pole had gone viral internationally, but no one had found the man at the centre of it all. Williams set out to find the elusive man.
4. Guy Goes To Haast
Haast has had no cellphone reception for years, but with new coverage on the way Williams travels to Haast to find out what the locals think and get them up to speed on cellphones. This segment is also notable for one of the best musical moments on NZ television in the first 20 seconds.
3. Lake Taupo Hole In One
Is the lake Taupo Hole-in-one challenge a scam? Williams goes to investigate the conspiracy!
2. 24 Hour Guppy Fish Farm
Why is there a 24/7 guppy farm and shop operating out of a nondescript West Auckland building? Williams goes to investigate and uncovers an amazing character.
A house in Fielding has been on the market for more than ten years. Williams goes to find out why… and the story falls flat, but then something better turns up.
Inarguably the best sports drama of all time, Friday Night Lights, dropped in its entirety on Lightbox last week. Sam Brooks on why you should watch it – and the other cult classics you might not know are on the service.
Tim Riggins, my past, present and future fictional husband.
I’m surprised this show didn’t incorporate some sort of partnership with Kleenex, because I don’t think I’ve cried more watching a single television show in my life.
It would be easy (and highly incorrect) to write Friday Night Lights off as just being about sports. While the initial pitch might be “it’s about a high school football team”, the more accurate pitch would be “it’s about a small town that has an unhealthy focus on high school sport, it’s about family, it’s about high school, it’s about marriage, it’s about humanity, it’s about managing expectations, it’s about you, it’s about me, and it makes me cry.” Also it might be about Connie Britton’s hair?
That hair!
There’s a lot to love about Friday Night Lights. The big thing it gets right – and this is very easy to underrate – is its understanding of how families interact with each other. The Taylors are one of the more delicately drawn families I’ve seen on TV, and the Taylor marriage especially so; Friday Night Lights understands the ways that families listen to each other, the ways that they fail each other, and the ways that families pull together in the many faces of adversity. There’s a lot to love and recommend about the show, but I keep coming back to that. It’s goddamned inspirational, aspirational television.
Is this not the handsomest couple you’ve ever seen?
It’s amazing that the show that brought Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, American Gods, Star Trek: Discovery) to prominence seems to be an odd footnote at the bottom of his illustrious career. After the short-lived curios that were Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies was Fuller’s first step into the high-concept and high-design television that has defined his career since.
The concept? Ned, played by the consistently adorable and even more consistently tall Lee Pace, has the ability to bring people back to life with a touch. The catch? If that person is alive for longer than one minute, another living thing in the vicinity must fall dead. The other catch? If he touches that person again, they die again.
Of course, this concept ends up with Ned helping a friend solve murders, but that’s just the overarching excuse for a plot that every show needs. What Pushing Daisies is actually about is the relationship between Ned and his childhood sweetheart, Chuck, played by Anna Friel, who is at her most fragile and winsome in this role. When Ned finds out that Chuck has been murdered, he brings her back to life but can’t bring himself to let her go. Tragic, tortured love ensues.
Pushing Daisies is one of those shows that garnered huge enthusiasm with critics and a devoted following of fans, but it just missed the boat on becoming the true sensation it should have been. It’s a beautiful watch now – the production design is sweet enough to give you diabetes 1 through 25, because also Ned is a pie maker – but what really grabs you is the quiet, sad intensity between Ned and Chuck, who are doomed to a touchless love before they even realise they’re doomed to it.
Also, it gave us a (rightly Emmy Award winning) Kristin Chenoweth belting out ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’, provided below for your viewing delight:
Veronica Mars was one of those shows that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When it first aired it was on UPN, a channel which no longer exists, and in a time when audiences still needed their television in cleanly defined genres. If you weren’t a show about six 20 year olds hanging out in an apartment, or about solving sex crimes, you weren’t being watched!
If you missed out on watching Veronica Mars, you missed out on not only one of the first examples of ‘teen noir‘, but some of the most astutely written and performed high school characters I’ve ever seen on television. It’s amazing to think of this as Kristen Bell’s first big role, because she slam-dunks the role of the popular girl turned outcast (and private detective). The same bruised flintiness that Bell brought to House of Lies and currently The Good Place is present here, and she has the dramatic chops to carry the heavier scenes.
The first season is especially brilliant, focusing on Veronica figuring out who murdered her best friend Lily, while also coming to terms with what happened to her on the night of Lily’s disappearance. The resolution of that storyline isn’t what sticks out for me, though. It’s the beautiful interplay between Veronica and the sunny LA town of Neptune, a town which she no longer considers home. It’s a great, underrated show which holds up a lot better than much of the drama from this era.
“Not even, ow.” was the quote of the day, if you happened to be in my high school circa 2004.
An adult animated show in the vein of Family Guy (potentially not the most favourable comparison, unless you’re a fan of that show), bro’town was a Naked Samoans creation that encapsulates what New Zealand was talking about in 2004. So: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Lucy Lawless and Michael Jones.
What elevates bro’town these days is that time capsule feeling. In a way that was unique to New Zealand television – which tends to try to capture a specific milieu (hello, the 80s! Also hello, the fictional town of Brokenwood) or tries very much to be set somewhere unspecific in Auckland (hello, nearly every other television show made in the country!) – bro’town was a clear response to New Zealand popular culture of the time. It was irreverent, it was an inside joke to anybody who lived anywhere else, and it never tried to be anything other than set in New Zealand.
Parks and Recreation is one of those shows that sits in the strange place between cult classic and legitimate classic. If you were on the internet at any point after its first season (which practically everybody involved with the show has disowned as an unfortunate teething period), then chances are you’ve engaged with Parks and Recreation whether you like it or not.
And why the hell wouldn’t you like it? Parks and Recreation is the most relentlessly positive show on television. It’s the show that told you to treat yo’ self, as well you should. There’s no character in fiction who demonstrates the unshakeable potential goodness of humanity quite like Leslie Knope. If Tami Taylor is my hair goals, Leslie Knope is my soul goals. But even outside of Leslie Knope, it’s got one of the strongest ensemble casts in a mid-to-late-aughts sitcom (Nick Offerman, Aziz Ansari, Retta, Aubrey Plaza, Adam Scott, and a killer guest rotation) and every episode leaves you feeling a little bit better about yourself, and humanity.
It’s David Lynch. He might not be the guy who coined the term ‘cult classic’, because I assume both cults and classics preceded him, but he’s the guy who falls mostly conveniently into the categorisation. He’s the director the guy you went to film school pretended to understand and love, and you went along with it, but then a few years after film school, you watched Lynch’s movies again and you understood them on a deeper, primal level – so much so that they made you cry. This is me talking about a fictional person, obviously, and not projecting my own highly specific experience onto yours.
My point is, Mulholland Drive is David Lynch’s best film, it’s a cult classic, and you should see it and enrich your life. There’s also this haunting song from it:
Actually, scratch what I said earlier. This is the real cult classic – a New Zealand show that was so, so huge overseas, I mean huge, like ‘online communities still obsessed with it’ huge. For some reason, The Tribe was dumped on a Sunday afternoon here, which is the place for either the best television shows in the world or fishing shows, and absolutely nothing in between.
But what is The Tribe, I hear you ask, as though you never lived in New Zealand in the early aughts. It was a show set in post-apocalyptic Not!Wellington (having watched it a few times this year, I could not tell you where anybody is meant to be from). It follows groups, you might even call them ‘tribes’, of teenagers as they try to survive after whatever destroyed most of the country/world.
It’s wild, it’s wacky, and it’s very much of its time – which is what makes it perfect for your weekend hangover binge.
Look, cult classics come in all shapes and sizes. And one of those shapes and/or sizes is a remake of Dangerous Liaisons starring a practically fetal Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Philippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair.
This film is wild, you guys! The soundtrack is stacked (that Placebo song!), there’s a scene where Christine Baranski is racist, there’s another scene where Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar share saliva, and also Sarah Michelle Gellar has a lot of coke in a crucifix. Is it the best movie? God no. Is it the best version of Dangerous Liaisons? Also no, but jesus, it’s a lot of fun, and the haze of watching famous people do naughty things and be incredibly attractive while doing so settles very comfortably over this film.
