The recent series on Three reminds us why we need to keep making brave local drama, writes Tara Ward.
When After the Party stormed onto New Zealand television screens in 2023, we couldn’t get enough. We called the award-winning drama “gritty, wrenching and highly confronting” and “the best TV drama we’ve ever made”, and celebrated when it received glowing international praise. Since then, we’ve seen plenty of well-made local dramas come and go – Friends Like Us, Dark City, The Gone, A Remarkable Place to Die – but none managed to feel quite as bold and compelling as After the Party. That is, until March this year, when Crackhead began.
Created by, written and starring Holly Shervey (Millennial Jenny) and directed by Shervey’s husband Emmett Skilton (The Almighty Johnsons), Crackhead is a dark comedy-drama that draws on Shervey’s own experience of psychiatric care. Shervey plays Frankie, a young woman with addiction and mental health issues who is given one important choice: jail, or a stint in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation programme. Frankie quickly discovers the “luxury rehab” is actually a run-down facility filled with people as volatile and self-destructive as she is, and for the next 28 days, she must follow a strict set of rules: no sex, no drugs, no phones, and lots of group therapy.
When Crackhead premiered last month, I watched the first two episodes and called it the best local drama of the year. Now that the eight-episode season has finished, I’m confident that it’s the best TV show we’ve made in some time. Watching that first episode of Crackhead reminded me of how I felt after I watched Outrageous Fortune for the first time. This felt like nothing we’d seen on New Zealand television before – what exactly was this show? Who were these extremely flawed-but-relatable characters, who shocked us one minute and made us empathise and laugh with them the next?
Crackhead has that same confident sense of self that Outrageous had, the same audacious attitude, the same vivid sense of time and place. It’s rare to have all of that in a single local television show, but Crackhead pulls it off – and across all eight episodes, no less. That raw, frenetic energy of the opening scenes continues through the entire season, right down to the final desperate seconds. The longer you watch, the darker the show becomes, the more vital the humour. Crackhead never lets its foot off the accelerator, and the season cliffhanger left me with my heart racing and my jaw on the floor.
Before that, I had wondered if this would be the ultimate local drama – a single perfect season, one and done, all of Frankie’s loose ends tied up neatly in a happy ending. Of course, that’s not how life is, and Crackhead never once takes the easy route. From the first scene where Frankie tells a judge to “eat a dick”, to her seemingly unstoppable plummet towards rock bottom and that soul-destroying ending, Crackhead kept surprising us. In hindsight, that confronting cliffhanger was the only way Crackhead could have ended. Anything other than what Shervey and Skilton served up in those final moments would not have felt as authentic for Frankie (though certainly a lot less stressful for us).
Shervey is outstanding as the chaotic Frankie, our antihero who swings constantly from furious to fragile and back again. She’s surrounded by a brilliant supporting cast of local talent, and from the mesmerising Ana Scotney as Frankie’s terrifying roommate Lydia to Sara Wiseman’s unflappable psychiatrist, there is no weak link in Crackhead. Each character is so richly drawn that you could make a spinoff series about any of them, and it would make for a gripping eight-episode series of its own. The vibrant local soundtrack stretches from The Mockers to Lance Savali and Shervey’s sharp comedic writing knows just when to cut through the heaviness and give us room to breathe.
Crackhead won’t be for everyone. It deals unflinchingly with mental illness and addiction, and there are uncomfortable moments when the tension between mental health and humour is tested. But its rawness and honesty reminds us why it’s so important that we continue to make brave television that centres our own voices and stories. In a television landscape filled with cosy crime dramas and reality TV, it’s been a thrill to watch a New Zealand show this gutsy and funny and unapologetic. If there isn’t a second season of Crackhead, we’ll all have to riot.
All eight episodes of Crackhead are available on ThreeNow.
