Stath Lets Flats has been hailed as the best Brit-com since Ricky Gervais’s The Office. So why can’t we see it?

Stath Charalambos, an inept, Greek-born, London-based letting agent, is attempting to show a father and his young son around a three-bedroom flat. It’s available to rent for £1,100 a month, but Stath hasn’t made a good first impression, bending over to ask the child, “Are you a kid?” before wildly swinging his arms towards him.

Inside the flat, he doesn’t fare much better. Standing in the lounge, Stath shows off a “wide-screen TV” no larger than a standard laptop screen, then tells the pair his boss died recently. Feeling the tension, Stath tries to throw in a sweetener. “We will fill this room with bricks,” he says, gesturing around the flat’s small lounge. The camera pans out, and Stath is, inexplicably, standing in the middle of the framework of a chair that is missing its seat. The father turns down the flat. Of course he does. Anyone would.

Welcome to the crazed, unhinged, awkward and often unintelligible world of Stath Lets Flats, the Brit-com that’s taken the world by storm. “The world,” that is, if it’s one of those spinning atlases that leaves little ol’ New Zealand well off the map. If you want to see it, legally speaking, I’m sorry to report that you can’t. In Aotearoa, Stath Let’s Flat is nowhere to be seen.

It’s a crying shame. Across three seasons, Stath Lets Flats has proven itself to be one of the funniest, smartest and straight-up weirdest shows on television. It follows Stath, and the rest of the mostly inept staff at his dad’s letting agency, as they screw up their jobs, mess up their lives and fail at all of their relationships.

All of this is led by Stath, played by the show’s creator Jamie Demetriou, who you might recognise as the buck-toothed creep from Fleabag, and his sister Sophie, played by Demetriou’s real-life sister Natasia, who plays Nadja on the equally excellent What We Do in the Shadows.

With the show now into its third season, Stath and his constant awkwardness has managed to spark a feud with a neighbouring letting agency, knock up a staff member, hook up with his sister’s obsessive best friend, struggle to take over his father’s business, and let approximately zero flats. He has, across almost every single interaction, made things hand-wringingly cringe, yet, somehow he and the rest of the crew come away from it looking like loveable halfwits. It’s like a low-brow Succession delivered by a cross between David Brent and Borat.

Along the way, Stath sure has provided some serious quotables. Twitter and Instagram accounts chronicle Stath’s mangled language in memes, things like, “It’s a lovely flat, there’s no willies” and “He thinks he’s the greatest thing since life’s bread” becoming immortalised across the internet. Not a day goes by that I don’t see a gif or quote dedicated to Stath’s garbled take on English.

It’s good. It’s sooo good. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at these headlines…

Then look at these tweets…

Despite all of this, Stath Lets Flats isn’t available on any legal streaming service in Aotearoa. TVNZ OnDemand doesn’t have it. It isn’t on ThreeNow. There’s no sign of it on Netflix, or Disney TV+, or Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ or even Acorn, a streaming service that prides itself on delivering “the best of British TV”. During their recent content announcements, neither Discovery nor TVNZ mentioned the show. As Stath himself would say: “Oh my crump!”

The situation of New Zealanders unable to see the show reminds me of The Office – both the UK version, which first screened here in a late-night time slot on TVNZ before becoming one of the noughties’ most praised comedies, and the US version, which for years was available only via dodgy YouTube streams and illegal downloads before becoming one of the streaming era’s most popular shows.

Stath just seems to have fallen through the cracks. It’s not the only one. Despite all those streaming options, Kiwi TV fans still can’t watch Hacks, the much-praised Jean Smart comedy from earlier this year, or binge-watch repeats of Lost, or see the excellent French spy show The Bureau. Taika Waititi’s Reservation Dogs took months to land here. And I’m still waiting for the latest seasons of Gomorrah, the excellent Italian mob show, to land.

For now, you’ll just have to wait, or explore other, possibly slightly dodgy, options. In the meantime, Stath Lets Flats just keeps getting more popular. America has already picked it up and is planning on doing that classically terrible thing of remaking it for US audiences. Their take on Stath is called Bren Rents. It probably won’t be any good. It definitely won’t come close to Stath Lets Flats. But it can try.

And hey, maybe the US version will arrive before the UK one does. Just like Stath failing to let a flat, that’s something you can probably count on.