Today, we are launching a week-long celebration of the last quarter century of local television. Alex Casey explains why. 

Over 10 years ago The Spinoff launched as a site hopelessly devoted to the weird and wonderful world of television. While our scope has evolved a lot since then, we’ve always made it a priority to keep celebrating and interrogating local TV. Whether it is the newest prestige drama or the latest episode of Celebrity Treasure Island, we’re so mad for television in all its forms that we even went as far as making a TV show ourselves in 2018 (RIP).

To celebrate our 10th birthday, we wanted to do something big and bold that both spoke to our humble television roots and signaled a brave and ambitious step into the next decade. We are proud to be a place that New Zealanders can turn to for both in-depth reflections and plenty of laughs about New Zealand popular culture, which is why we are launching a week-long celebration looking back at the last quarter century of local television. 

Starting at 9am today and counting down 20 shows a day, we will arguing the case for each show, and why they deserve a place in the history books. Our genius audience team has made a nifty interactive function where you can check off all the shows you have seen, and be sent a custom watchlist to flesh out your television education. The comments section will be open for debate, reminiscing, and gently telling us that we forgot a cult favourite webseries from 2011. 

This project has been germinating since late last year, while we were all in the white knuckle grip of After the Party (hmm, wonder if that will make the list?). Our editor Madeleine Chapman mused that it was the best drama we’ve ever made, and turned to the internet to fact check herself. While NZ On Screen is a treasure trove and there’s plenty of end-of-year lists, there was nothing that gave a wider overview of New Zealand television, no list to compare shows and fill in any knowledge gaps. 

We knew we had to do it. First, we pulled together a list of hundreds of titles from 2000 onwards, and set about establishing what we wouldn’t include. We ruled out international reality television formats (sorry to The Traitors NZ). Then we decided to take current affairs off the table too. Despite us holding a day-long online wake for Campbell Live back in 2015, it simply felt too tense to compare news products, and frankly the genre has been through enough this year. 

We also ruled out any shows that featured New Zealanders, but weren’t made in New Zealand. Most notably, that ruled out Flight of the Conchords, who are as bashful true-blue Kiwi as they come, but were famously turned down by TVNZ before heading overseas to the big wigs at HBO. It also meant no Starstruck, no Dark Tourist, no Our Flag Means Death, no Time Bandits (which was made in New Zealand, but New Zealand wasn’t really New Zealand, you know?) 

We then outlined loose criteria to consider, including: popularity, critical acclaim, awards, ambition, innovation, representation, talkability, longevity, legacy, influence, controversy, talent incubation, iconic moments and whether or not it had characters you could dress up as for Halloween. Our mindset throughout was to always consider the broader significance and cultural context of each series, rather than just the quality of content in a vacuum. 

We also assembled a powerful quartet of experts to lend their reckons: Diana Wichtel has been a television critic for The Listener for 36 years, Dan Taipua is a cultural critic and longtime contributor to The Spinoff, Erin Harrington is an arts and media critic and a senior lecturer in English and cinema studies at the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wāngana o Waitaha, and Boiler Room‘s Chris Schulz has covered popular culture for NZ Herald, Stuff, The Spinoff and RNZ for the past 20 years. 

I’ll warn you now: not every show could make the list and not every show could get the number one slot. To fight for the fallen and the forgotten, we are also putting on an exciting live event – Best TV Show Ever – on October 31 in Auckland. Join me, TV stars Kura Forrester and Rhiannon McCall, and The Spinoff’s Stewart Sowman-Lund and Lyric Waiwiri-Smith as we each argue our case for why our favourite low ranking (or entirely excluded) show is worth a prime slot in our television history books.

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As you might expect, this whole process has been equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. There’s been many, many, many sprawling phone calls, Slack messages and Google Meets. I have a screenshot from a meeting last week with my dear colleague Tara Ward, taken while she was desperately trying to remember a show that had come to her in the middle of the night. Her arms are raised, both hands on her forehead, as if trying to squeeze the info out manually. The show was… Brain Busters. 

I’m not going to tell you if Brain Busters made the list, but I can tell you that our brains are officially busted, and we are so excited to finally share this with you all and hear your reckons. It has been a pretty grim time for New Zealand television over the last few years, and we hope this serves as a reminder to champion the unique stories that only we can tell, and celebrate all the people working in television who likely busted their own brains trying to tell them. 

Happy reading, and happy watching.