TVNZ’s acclaimed series Creamerie breathes fresh life into the male-elimination concept. (Photo: TVNZ)

Pop CultureApril 19, 2021

Review: Creamerie is the post-pandemic comedy we need right now

Contributing writer

TVNZ’s acclaimed series Creamerie breathes fresh life into the male-elimination concept. (Photo: TVNZ)

A gender-flipped Handmaid’s Tale set during a pandemic… and it’s a black comedy? Somehow, the New Zealand show Creamerie nails it, writes Linda Burgess.

An extremely pregnant Tandi Wright, hands over tummy à la Meghan Markle, is speaking in mellifluous tones to a large group of women in one of those ubiquitous small-town halls. They’re waiting to hear whose number has come up and those of us who’ve read Shirley Jackson’s terrifying short story ‘The Lottery’ are already feeling uneasy. When paired with the soundtrack – Reb Fountain’s sexy rendition of ‘It’s a Wonderful World’, which expands to include a choir of angelic young girls, wholesome in a Princess Charlotte-meets-Gloriavale sort of a way – this comedy-drama is already sending out clear messages. And then, cut to a rugby club changing room where, inexplicably, every fit young sportsman is vomiting copious amounts of splatter-movie blood and being carted off on stretchers. Well done writers: so much established with such economy. Welcome to Aotearoa, some time soon.

That’s quite a lot to take in. Helpfully a timer on the top right-hand side of the screen is telling us – as we watch huge pyres of (male) bodies – that we’re now on Day 2920. That is, eight years have passed since every male on the planet was killed by a mystery virus. Fortunately, sperm banks have made the continuation of life possible. For the meantime, at least. Of course we can see nods to The Handmaid’s Tale – unavoidable in any dystopian drama featuring women – but unlike Handmaid’s Tale, Creamerie is actually darkly funny.

A lot is established in those first 20 or so minutes. Significantly, we learn that we’re watching something well-written and impressively well-acted. We’re in the most capable hands of Roseanne Liang, and she has her terrific co-writing team from Flat 3 and Friday Night Bites along with her again. We meet organic dairy farmers Alex (Ally Xue), Jamie (JJ Fong) and Pip (Perlina Lau), with their unisex names, waiting to see if they’ve won tonight’s little vial of sperm. When Jamie’s number comes up it leads to a small but perfect satirical scene as the doctor (Rachel House) peers between Jamie’s legs and pronounces that Jamie’s vulva is…impressive. I’m taken back to the 70s when women were encouraged to examine their bodies. I’m remembering the friend who told me that she lay on her kitchen table, among friends, and was told that she had a perfect cervix. This is a warning: if anyone ever tells you something like that, do not tell a person like me. People like me never forget.

Perlina Lau and Tandi Wright in TVNZ’s Creamerie. (Photo: TVNZ)

The casting of Tandi Wright as the guru-like leader of a repopulation organisation is genius. The wellness movement – and I apologise right now for antagonising a fair number of you – gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. That’s because movements of any kind leave me feeling glad I’m an outsider, and particularly the ones that tell me I have to look after myself better. Tandi Wright captures perfectly how flesh-creeping overtly kind, caring people can be.

Just as with any drama, comedy needs you to have empathy for the characters and their situation. Obviously not everyone finds a world without men such a bad thing. But we are subtly reminded that the death of all males means not just men but also boys have died. Male embryo self-abort immediately. It’s not dwelt on, but wisely it’s not ignored: this is a traumatised society. And at the end of episode one, things are about to change.

I’m a longtime admirer of Roseanne Liang who both co-wrote and directed this series. She first came to our attention in 2011 with her terrific film My Wedding and Other Secrets. That year it was the highest grossing local feature film in New Zealand, and so it should’ve been. More significantly it was the first feature film made by a Chinese New Zealander. Look at what Liang and the rest of this group of talented Chinese New Zealand women are doing now.

Writers who write about something and then it happens can carry some strange burden of guilt: They imagined it, and therefore somehow caused it to happen. Fortunately the virus that hit the world after they’d written this, though devastating, is not quite as horrendous as that imagined by Liang and company. But the wellness movement… is it too big an ask to beg them to imagine something a bit more palatable next time?

Creamerie screens on TVNZ2 tonight at 9.30pm, and the entire series can be streamed on TVNZ on Demand now.

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Pop CultureApril 19, 2021

When Chris Warner met Alf Stewart

Calum Henderson

Production editor

Australia Week: What happens when you get two trans-Tasman soap immortals together in the same room? We found out in 2016.

To mark the opening of the trans-Tasman bubble, The Spinoff is casting an eye across the ditch all week – read our Australia Week content here.

It could be a vision of the end of the world: Alf Stewart and Chris Warner, two characters who between them have spent over 50 years watching their friends and loved ones die at the hands of deranged serial killers, deadly bomb blasts and killer viruses, together in a lonely hospital waiting room. One is a small-town bait shop owner from Summer Bay, Australia, the other a world-class surgeon from Ferndale, New Zealand. They are the sole survivors.

Ray Meagher (Alf) and Michael Galvin (Dr. Warner) are the only remaining cast members from the first episodes of their respective shows: Home and Away, which first aired in 1988, and Shortland Street, which began in 1992. With Meagher in Auckland to perform in Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical (he plays Bob, an outback mechanic) we wanted to get them together in the same room and film them talking about their characters’ unusually long (by soap standards) lives.

Alf Stewart rarely travels further afield than Yabby Creek. Now he was coming to Ferndale.

Shortland Street is filmed at South Pacific Pictures, just off Lincoln Road in West Auckland. The back of the studio doubles as the front entrance of the hospital which can be seen at the start of every episode. The car park is the same car park where Huia Samuels exploded in a ball of flames.

Inside is a labyrinth of offices navigable by cast photos of every show that’s ever been produced at the studio. Turn left at Outrageous Fortune, hang a right at New Zealand Idol season one, then go down the stairs when you see the original cast of Go Girls. That’s where Alf met Chris.

“G’day mate,” said Meager. Sorry for being late, said Galvin. He introduced his daughter – “it’s the school holidays” – and welcomed his Aussie counterpart to his place of work. “Do you guys have dressing rooms?” he asked. “I’ve always wanted to ask that.”

Meagher began a detailed history of the Home and Away dressing room situation, 1988-2016. “I’ve got one,” Galvin bragged. “Well, I share it with two other guys. How much annual leave do you get?”

Waiting outside the set where the interview was to be filmed was like standing in a butterfly enclosure. Endless rare species of Shortland Street character fluttered past on an unknowable course. TK Samuels! Kylie! Damo from IT! Galvin introduced Meagher to Glen, the dastardly villain who drugged Rachel McKenna and drove her to leave Chris Warner in the previous night’s episode.

“This is Will [Wallace] – his character just got rid of my character’s wife,” he said. “Oh yeah,” Meagher replied, “kidnapper or shooter or…?”

Chris Warner and Alf Stewart having a laugh.

The reception area of Shortland Street Hospital is like one of those stress dreams where everything looks familiar but the dimensions are all wrong. From the front desk you can look through the open elevator doors into the ED where Wendy Cooper and countless others have laid bleeding to death on the operating table. When the studio doors close it is eerily quiet.

“Whatever happened to just flipping on the fluoros and saying ‘action’?” Meagher wondered out loud as a couple of harried technicians fiddled with the lights. Galvin held up the list of questions we provided as a guide for the interview. “I don’t want it to look like these are my questions,” he said.

For exactly 15 minutes a former hospital CEO and a former caravan park owner compared their weird double lives. They reminisced about the old days and long-forgotten characters who went to the dairy and never came back, and speculated about how their own characters will one day die (“This is a terrible question,” Galvin warned before asking, “you don’t have to answer it”).

They may come from different worlds, but Chris Warner and Alf Stewart get on like a house on fire. In all but one of the photos on my phone, Chris Warner is in the middle of some wild gesticulation, his mouth open and his hands all blurred. In the one where he’s not, Alf Stewart’s eyes are closed, and his head is tilted back in laughter.