Duncan Greive reviews Sky’s reboot of the hit sports comedy quiz show.
Blame 7 Days. It’s among the most successful shows in New Zealand television history, currently in its 16th season, still hauling in tens of thousands of viewers on linear TV with a format which features comedians cracking a mixture of live and pre-written jokes about current affairs. Locally, it’s spawned an entire genre, with shows like Have You Been Paying Attention, Patriot Brains and Guy Mont Spelling Bee, some of which are consistently funny, all of which have helped provide work to comics and entertainment to New Zealanders.
No issues with that – but none are particularly focussed the quiz part. 7 Days famously explodes the concept of the score entirely, while the other shows are more in line with conservative myths about school sports: that it’s more about taking part than winning. Or in this case, cracking jokes than beating the opposition.
The rebooted Game of 2 Halves (cumbersome full title: The Alternative Commentary Collective does Game of 2 Halves) is a revival of a 2000s-era TVNZ hit, and a shot of old-fashioned quiz values, in that it’s really about the quiz. Not that there aren’t jokes, but they’re all unwritten, and a by-product of having funny people on the teams, rather than the whole point of the exercise.
The previous iteration had what was in retrospect a cursed cast, most of whom have gone on to a fate somewhere between grumpiness and exile. It was funny then, but surviving clips haven’t aged well. The show was a product of a particular TV era, very jock-forward, one which burned bright before disappearing fairly quickly. Those personalities now skulk around the edges of media, and the ACC entertainment universe has largely supplanted them, so it’s fitting they’ve been handed the reboot of this show.
It hasn’t lost the chaos entirely, but has considerably modulated the old raw laddishness. It’s hosted by omnipresent Sky Sports presenter Laura McGoldrick, who brings an exasperated headteacher energy, and the show takes place on a spare set, with each team facing one another in a V-formation. Matt Heath, who only yesterday announced an intriguing move from Hauraki to ZB, hosts one team, while the ACC’s Manaia Stewart leads the other. For the first episode, Heath is joined by the charismatic double gold medalist Black Fern Michaela Blyde and former Highlander Joey Wheeler, while Stewart has the suddenly-everywhere Brodie Kane and Chris Key, a stalwart reporter for the Crowd Goes Wild (a tonal touchstone for the new Game of 2 Halves).
The show sets off at a frenetic pace, with a quickfire round of deceptively tricky questions (sample: who held the Ranfurly Shield for the longest tenure? It’s Southland – thanks to World War II). They play a batch of clips with memory-based questions; a variation on charades; and two truths one lie, wherein the teams try to deceive one another based on outlandish stories from their past. Heath has a great yarn about Richie McCaw feigning engine trouble while piloting a helicopter, while Kane gets to brag about defeating Lisa Carrington at surf lifesaving.
The show is unashamedly bare bones, clips and as-live studio scenes. Unlike other comedy panel shows, which can sometimes access NZ on Air funding, Game of 2 Halves is purely commercially funded, largely through naming rights sponsor the TAB. The newly revved up betting agency’s colours are adopted for the show’s own, and the only new segment is called “the multi”. This feels very predictive of the fast-arriving future of television in this country, with brands increasingly incorporated deeply into the content, and funding most, if not all, of the core production costs.
That can sound dystopian, and is not the ideal way for the system to work, but Game of 2 Halves suggests it’s not a deal breaker either. Aside from the name, the multi has nothing to do with gambling, and instead features Dai Henwood and Leigh Hart reading from the just-released and genuinely good ACC Almanac. It’s more an older media tactic: that of cross-promotion.
The Alternative Commentary Collective is one of the most original New Zealand media creations of this century, and is at some kind of zenith right now, with a book and a linear TV show, along with its ever-expanding network of podcasts, commentary and slickly integrated marketing campaigns. While the rebooted Game of 2 Halves breaks little new ground – aside from having a near-even gender split, which would have been unimaginable before – it also knows exactly what it’s trying to be.
Aside from persistent promo for the extremely doomed test between the Black Caps and Afghanistan, they largely made it work. A quiz show with two teams trying to win first and crack jokes second? After years away from our screens, it feels like the right answer.