Every morning this week we’re counting down the top 100 New Zealand TV shows of the 21st century so far. Today, numbers 40-21.
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Welcome to The Top 100, a week-long celebration of the most significant local television of the last quarter century. Every day, we will count down 20 iconic shows, and explain why they deserve a place in our history books. Our criteria included everything from popularity to polarisation, critical acclaim to cultural impact, innovation to influence, longevity and legacy (more about that here).
While not everything could make this list, and we have undoubtedly forgotten things despite our best efforts (the comments are open for your feedback), we hope this serves as a reminder to champion the unique stories that only we can tell, and celebrate all the people trying to tell them. Feel free to check off the shows you have seen as you read to create a cool custom watchlist to continue your New Zealand education into the future.
Let’s crack into it.
Monday: 100-81 | Tuesday: 80-61 | Wednesday: 60-41 | Today: 40-21 | Friday: 20-1
40. Find Me a Māori Bride (2015-2017)
The year is 2015, and the word “metrosexual” is still in wide use. Two “metro” Māori cousins, Tama (Cohen Holloway) and George (Matariki Whatarau), are tasked with finding the Māori wāhine of their late kuia’s dreams in order to inherit her $47m farm. Find Me a Māori Bride felt like a breath of fresh air when it launched on Whaakata Māori, a mockumentary style series that blended reality television – namely, The Bachelor and Survivor – with te ao Māori tradition.
The show was as much of a 101 on Māori language, culture and tikanga as it was an incredibly effective comedy. Tama and George’s struggle to connect with their identity made for a watch that was both entertaining without feeling like a piss-take, and educational without feeling too serious. It is a crime against New Zealand society that the series never made it past two seasons, and now is only available to stream through the University of Auckland (no lie). At least this ranking remembers the importance of this taonga. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
39. The Tribe (1999-2003)
Set in a post-apocalyptic world where a virus has killed everyone over the age of 18, The Tribe ran for five seasons and is generally considered one of the most internationally successful shows we’ve ever made (at least by the metrics of “has an alarmingly detailed fan wiki“). Shot in Wellington, the series employed over 500 local cast and crew including Antonia Prebble, Michelle Ang and Megan Alatini. Fun fact: The Tribe was the first of six times (and counting) that Antonia Prebble would give birth on screen.
While telling a gritty Lord of the Flies style story of feuding teen tribes, the series also captured what Patrick Hunn lovingly called “the most enchanting miscalculations” that were happening in Y2K fashion at the time. Whether it was endless glitter, pointless zips, or a proliferation of white dreadlocks, the powerful steampunk aesthetic of The Tribe can still be summoned by many in an instant.
There’s also the enduring images of post-apocalyptic Lambton Quay swarming with baddies on roller blades, kids in facepaint on a stretch of Kāpiti beach, and the haunting fairy lights of the abandoned Phoenix mall. “I have seen the cradle of civilisation after The Fall, and it is a mall in Lower Hutt,” Hunn wrote for us. “It is the best thing that New Zealand has ever produced. It’s also the worst, but that’s OK.” / Alex Casey
38. Good Morning (1996-2015)
There is no other daytime television show that ran for so long, over so many years, and involved so many different New Zealanders as Good Morning. The TVNZ magazine lifestyle series began in 1996, and during its impressive 19 year run, featured a variety of hosts and talent. Presenters like Mary Lambie, Lisa Manning (who met her husband, actor Jon Rhys-Davies on the show), Angela D’Audney, Kerrie Smith, Jeanette Thomas and Matai Smith offered people at home – the retired, parents with young children, hungover students – a familiar, reassuring sense of companionship and connection.
Every morning at 9am, Good Morning beamed out across the nation. The show had to fill 15 hours of live TV every single week, and they made it look easy. Those of us watching were guaranteed a laugh or two, some new local music or a delicious new recipe, and an interview with a visiting celebrity or an everyday New Zealander with a story to tell. You’d also have to sit through numerous advertorials, where infomercial queen Suzanne Paul and friends would drop bowling balls onto bamboo pillows or stand on the latest vibrating fitness plate, but even those ads had a low-budget, low-stakes charm to them.
“As long as they had the advertorials, it felt like Good Morning had a rare amount of freedom to do pretty much whatever it wanted with the rest of the time. That was where the magic of live television happened,” The Spinoff wrote in 2015. That magic was everywhere: when craft expert Astar became a dying swan, or Jeanette Thomas was hypnotised live on air, or the camera close-up on Astar’s fabric stiffener called “Stiffy”. Amid the eclectic mix of bonkers fitness routines and talkback sessions (phone and fax), Mary Lambie would bring her cat Louie in (“I thought he’d fry himself on the lights,” she admitted in the show’s final episode). Falling ratings saw the sun set on Good Morning in 2015; daytime television hasn’t been the same since. / Tara Ward
37. The Panthers (2021)
Six-part miniseries The Panthers arrived on the 50th anniversary of the Polynesian Panther’s founding and formed part of a broader commemoration involving community hui, news media, and educational tours. This expanded historical background allowed for more dramatic movement within the show’s storyline, where parallel plots give a broader context and feeling for the time: Muldoon’s rise to power, parallel movements for women’s liberation, and a well-drawn street-level milieu for the Polynesian youth of 1970s Auckland.
The real juice of the show is its willingness to break from the traditional New Zealand drama style by adopting tropes from classical theatre and postmodern filmmaking. The first episode opens with an operatic prelude from Diggy Dupé and Troy Kingi, with Dupé reappearing throughout the series as a Greek chorus figure reflecting on the plot and times. When Robert Muldoon wins the general election, trap drums roll out as a modern gangster’s victory theme.
There’s something of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in the mix, but a better and more appropriate touchstone is the later works of African-American film director Spike Lee with his revisionist Lysistrata and A Huey P. Newton Story. The willingness of The Panthers to try something different resonates with the energy of the youth it portrays, and if they can pass some of that along to today’s young Pasifika they’ve won something special. / Daniel Taipua
36. The Jaquie Brown Diaries (2008–2009)
In this Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque mockumentary, TV personality and former C4 host Jaquie Brown starred as as a twisted version of herself, with cameos and co-stars (Helen Clark! Rhys Darby! Mike Puru!) from the broadcasting and entertainment world cropping up each and every week. Even by 2008 mockumentary was a well-trodden formula, but The Jaquie Brown Diaries took us to much darker places than you would expect from what starts off as a quirky sitcom.
As I wrote back in 2021, “by the end of its 14-episode run, Brown has taken on terrorists, worked at the Carpet Warehouse and enjoyed a stint on a Survivor-esque reality show.” These subplots are all over-the-top, but they work because The Jaquie Brown Diaries is consistently laugh-out-loud funny. And, despite airing over a decade ago, it still holds up now. Some of that magic can be put down to co-creator and director Gerard Johnstone, who went on to direct cult favourite local horror Housebound and global sensation M3gan.
All we need now is for Jaquie and Gerard to reunite and finally deliver a resolution to that cliffhanger ending, the one that sees Brown and her unhinged nemesis about to face off in the “broadcasting battle of the century”. It’s not too late! / Stewart Sowman-Lund
35. Jono and Ben (2012–2018)
For seven glorious years, New Zealand had something great: a popular late-night comedy talk show. Jono and Ben at Ten first debuted in 2012 and thrived on the low expectations and lax standards of the 10pm slot. It was edgy, weird, a bunch of funny people throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck, and it was brilliant. JABAT was the hot new show that everyone was talking about, and soon became appointment viewing in the common room of my university hall.
The prank segments were an evolution from Boyce’s previous series Pulp Sport and got even more outrageous. Convincing a TV3 HR rep to “fire” Guy Williams was right on the edge of too cruel. The musical parodies were brilliantly written albeit poorly performed (unless Laura Daniel was involved). Hamilton: A Waikato Musical was a standout. Robbie Magasiva’s appearance on The Next Actor was one of the greatest TV comedy skits ever made.
The ambitious shift in season three to a live 7:30pm timeslot was largely successful, but did sand down some of the rough edges of the show. It had to become more family-friendly, more mainstream, safer. Still, it lasted four more seasons and fostered a whole generation of new young comedy talent including Rose Matafeo, Jamaine Ross, Angella Dravid, Chris Parker, Joseph Moore, Laura Daniel, Alice Snedden and of course, Guy Williams and his extremely successful spinoff show New Zealand Today. / Joel McManus
34. Insider’s Guide to Happiness (2004)
The scripts were dense, the cast list long, the screen wide, the budget huge. The questions each episode asked were profound, too: “Will the truth make you happy?” … “Do you deserve to be happy?” For 13 episodes, Insider’s Guide to Happiness followed a group of eight separate 20-somethings whose stories promised to intertwine. How? Get this: the central premise focused on Will Hall’s James, a foppish, happy-go-lucky chap from Whanganui who, for the entire first episode, was stuck in a car wash. Nearby, a car accident caused someone to drop a vase containing the spirit of a Tibetan monk. That spirit entered James, who embarked on a mystical journey to spread happiness and unite all those characters.
I remember watching Insider’s Guide feeling immensely proud. The Sopranos was out and The Wire was catching on, and here was our own big-budget, intricately-plotted, weird, wacky and proudly Aotearoa vision of what TV could be. We could do this! Couldn’t we? Did we ever realise that vision? A shortened second season, called Insider’s Guide to Love, couldn’t match the ambition of season one, and our future attempts at HBO-style TV – from The Cult to This is Not My Life to Burying Brian – never lasted more than a season. But every now and then, we knocked it out of the park. Insider’s Guide remains one of those moments. / Chris Schulz
33. Moon TV (2002–2010)
Leigh Hart might be the most original and idiosyncratic auteur in New Zealand television history, and Moon TV is the most chaotic and comprehensive expression of his vision. It started life as a newspaper created to finance Hart’s time in broadcasting school, and the content and tone of Hart’s gonzo yet somehow loving parody of modern media was established in those pages.
He worked in comparatively normal jobs for Greenstone, before attracting a cult following as “That Guy” on SportsCafe. Still, it was only with the debut of Moon TV in 2002 that the vision of Leigh Hart was revealed. Moon TV functions as a television universe unto itself, with observational documentary (Speedo Cops, the Hamsterman from Amsterdam), drama (Naan Doctors), lifestyle (Speed Cooking) and arts programming (Bookzone).
The conceits were ludicrously simple – Naan Doctors is Shortland Street in a curry house, Speedo Cops is Police 10 7 in speedos – but the jokes, helped by Hart’s hyper-committed performance and nervous eye darts to camera, land every time. From Moon TV sprang an array of spinoffs, including the dazzling Late Night Big Breakfast and Screaming Reels, as repetitive and singular as krautrock.
The most extraordinary thing about it might be how it was made. Hart largely eschewed the NZ on Air system, or even regular production houses. A tiny crew of committed collaborators made the bulk of his oeuvre, much of it funded by comical product placements and sausage ads. Eventually he went direct to consumer to finance his work, creating smash hit products in Wakachangi beer and Snackachangi chips. All of it built on the bizarro Mooniverse. / Duncan Greive
32. The collected works of David Lomas (2009–present)
Who is that solitary man in black? His painstakingly enunciated introduction – “I’m. David Lomas.” – gives little away. His manner falls somewhere between the Lone Ranger or a priest, a man of mystery heading into town to right wrongs and then walk off into the sunset.
Lomas has been helping to put fractured families back together since TV3’s Missing Pieces first screened in 2009. Over many years his schtick has developed a certain ritualized rhythm that must be reassuring to his subjects, about to enter the uncharted territory of secrets and silences. There’s the walk along the beach with his latest subject: “So what is your story?” There’s the research back in his Auckland boatshed office, the thoughtful scanning of the horizon. With the help of experts, DNA testing, a lot of gumshoe work and gentle persuasion Lomas delivers the goods.
After Missing Pieces came Lost and Found and most recently, David Lomas Investigates, which has taken him to Hong Kong, Romania, Vietnam, Tonga, and Brazil. I’ve approached each show with a topped-up glass of wine and a box of tissues. It’s not just that the reunions are so intensely moving. Many of the stories are a reproach to times not entirely past when it was not deemed necessary for children to have the right to their background, their stories, the data they carry in their DNA. Lomas began as a journalist and is still engaged in the increasingly undervalued job that journalists are supposed to do. The pursuit of the truth. / Diana Wichtel
31. Attitude (2005–present)
Since 2005, the quintessential Attitude story has been allowing audiences a window into the life of someone living with disability – anorexia or locked in syndrome or a brain haemorrhage or foetal alcohol or almost anything which can be experienced. And because it has been making these documentaries for so long – just shy of two decades – Attitude’s work collectively amounts to a tapestry of the disability experience that is now made up of hundreds of real New Zealanders and their daily lives.
The show has persistently been given indifferent slots on linear television, but has found a vast global audience on YouTube, where its deeply affecting, and empathetically told stories have been viewed tens of millions of times. As a result, Attitude’s role in increasing knowledge of and changing the political sentiment toward people with disabilities cannot be overstated. The continued growth of disability storytelling, from Attitude’s own reality romance series Down for Love, to Wheel Blacks: Bodies on the Line to The D*List – is hard to envisage without Attitude’s pathbreaking work. / Duncan Greive
30. Head High (2020–2021)
It might seem fanciful that an elite private school could share a boundary with an impoverished state school, but Golf Rd is all that separates Kings from Ōtāhuhu College in South Auckland. That proximity, Auckland’s disparities in miniature, forms the backdrop for Head High. It takes the tensions and relationships which are routine in top grade high school rugby, and lands a visceral, wrenching tragedy square in the middle.
Thanks to powerful yet understated performances from Miriama McDowell, Craig Hall, Jayden Daniels and Te Ao O Hinepehinga Rauna, Head High had a chance to be our Friday Night Lights. It shot for a level of realism which is rare in our drama, starting well and improving with a powerful second season, before being cut down in its prime, victim to Three’s perpetual ownership issues and the game of slots which is NZ on Air’s big leagues funding scrap.
Its cancellation was cruel and too soon, but it still stands as a beautifully crafted story, one which never had a chance to grow old and stale. / Duncan Greive
29. Pulp Comedy (1995-2003)
Before the age of streaming and on-demand, certain TV shows had a quality of always being on – motorsports were always on, some unnameable British drama was always on, and Pulp Comedy was always on. Realistically, there can’t be more than 80 episodes, but it felt like maybe three or four hundred at the time.
The above isn’t a complaint so much as a tally of the show’s impact and breadth – over eight years they must have surveyed the entirety of New Zealand’s stand-up comedy scene. Filmed in a typical comedy stage manner at the Powerstation in Auckland, the show took on a gala format with comics delivering their tightest five-minute sets over an hour runtime. The theatre was always packed with a live audience, proof of the scene’s strength at the time.
Standup comedy has a cyclical popularity with peaks and troughs spread across a decade, hot for some years and cold for others. Pulp Comedy captured the peaks of its period and gave a stage to a generation of talents: Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi, Rhys Darby, Cal Wilson, Mike King, and a whole milieu of later-familiar faces.
Exposure was a rare resource in the 90s-00s media age, and Pulp Comedy shared it liberally. When New Zealand stand-up comedy hit another peak period in the 2010s, I was surprised that the gala format didn’t return. But by then the avenues for stage time and screen time had both expanded, and local comedy was, once again, always on. / Daniel Taipua
28. The Dead Lands (2020)
Toa Fraser’s pre-colonial Māori language action film The Dead Lands (2014) featured a young warrior on a quest to avenge the death of his tribe, and his father. It was pretty serious masculine stuff, interspersed with excellent mau rākau fight sequences. The English language TV adaptation points in a different direction tonally. The eight-episode series was the first New Zealand show to be commissioned directly by an American network. AMC distributed the show on their horror platform Shudder, showcasing Māori storytelling and traditions on a global scale.
With a fully Māori and Pasifika cast, and a fully local crew, the show keeps us in the mythic past. It ups the stakes, soups up the female roles, and tilts us into a genre that’s a combination of action, splatter, and tongue-in-cheek comedy. There’s also zombies, which is kinda fitting, given AMC is the home of The Walking Dead.
Te Kohe Tuhaka puts in a blinder of a performance as murdered warrior Waka Nuku Rau, a real piece of work who is flung back into the land of the living. He finds that land ravaged by hordes of (un)dead who are unable to enter the afterlife. He must help young woman Mehe (newcomer Darneed Christian) avenge the death of her father and take on the monsters, and to possibly redeem himself.
The show is an absolute romp. It’s funny, scary, action-packed and bloody, flicking between intense close-quarters combat and sweeping landscapes. Its stylised presentation looks great, like a graphic novel come to life. It also has a distinctly Māori sense of humour; producer Tainui Stephens called it a “fine Māori piss-take”. In an age of increasingly fragmented production and distribution, The Dead Lands’ success highlights the particular global appeal of (and demand for) Indigenous, genre-based storytelling. / Erin Harrington
27. Educators (2019–2022)
In 2022, I visited the set of Educators, our wildest improvised comedy show, to see exactly how the crazed mind of showrunner Jesse Griffin really worked. Like a mad conductor, Griffin writes Educators in real-time, shouting out lines, riffs or directions to his actors on the fly. Like Curb Your Enthusiasm, there’s no script and actors are given just rough notes. “I know what we’re doing about 10 minutes before we start doing it,” actor Rick Donald told me. “There’s a looseness to it. It’s fresh.”
I agree. I love all three seasons of Educators so much I would rank it as the most consistent comedy show we’ve made, the lols coming from Tom Sainsbury’s teacher Rudy Beard stealing his neighbour’s identity to Jackie Van Beek’s stern Robyn Duffy having a love affair with an octogenarian and PE teacher Vinnie hiding his criminal past while bullying his students. Australia rates Griffin and Van Beek so highly they got them to film The Office Australia in a similar way. We can only hope they return home for a fourth season of Educators. / Chris Schulz
26. Westside (2015-2020)
A bona fide prequel to the wildly popular and critically acclaimed Outrageous Fortune, before prequels were the go-to franchise expansion move of the streaming era, Westside took us back to 1974 and opened with Ted West (David de Lautour) getting out of jail. As Russell Baillie noted, by the end of the first episode, it was clear that, like its predecessor, the show would revolve around its matriarch, Rita West (Antonia Prebble). That casting, with Prebble playing Loretta in Outrageous Fortune and, via flashback, her past/future self Rita, felt wickedly clever. That we could sustain 12 seasons of tightly written and well-cast New Zealand television, with one family at its core, felt like a coming of age. It also felt like it could go on forever.
With the benefit of hindsight, Westside was able to reflect our recent history to us, with carless days, the Dawn Raids and the Springbok Tour woven throughout. As Amelia Petrovich wrote in 2016, Westside was “The Outrageous Kiwi history lesson I never knew I needed”. The show also gave us one of the most stylish TV characters to grace our screens in Ngaire Munroe (Esther Stephens), whose wardrobe I still covet. Fortunately for me, and other fans of the Westside fits, costume designer Sarah Aldridge shared her how to be the “best dressed in the West” secrets with us in 2016. / Anna Rawhiti-Connell
25. Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee (2023–present)
It’s hard to find genuine innovation in game shows, but Guy Montgomery’s anarchic take on the wholesome spelling bee is consistently surprising, hilarious, and a little messed up. Montgomery is an impeccable host with lightning reflexes. He uses the established tropes of the spelling bee – a word’s definition, place of origin, and use in a sentence – to construct elaborate metatextual gags. Deadpan comic Sanjay Patel acts as low-status sidekick, offsetting Montgomery’s aggressive cheer, acting out bizarre scenarios, and escorting the loser to the dunce stool.
The format, which started off as an online lockdown boredom buster, has really hit its stride on television, with the benefit of a budget and the momentum of a full season. The show’s lo-fi 70s-inspired brown and pink set, live audience, somewhat demented energy, and bizarre internal logic gets the best (and worst) out of a collection of emerging and established comedians. It’s a show that lets its contestants fail forward, from the straight-laced opening round, where they can pick the difficulty level of words (not that that’s always an indication of their achievability), to segments built on increasingly absurd sketch comedy.
Most notably, the show has a crackling sense of energy and spontaneity that’s been massaged out of a lot of other comedy formats. Contestants can’t prep their way to success, and some of the best moments are rooted in frustration and hostility. In one episode, a decade’s worth of boardgame-related enmity spills out between Rose Matafeo and Eli Matthewson. In another, a frustrated Guy Williams challenges the audience to a fight in the carpark. “I didn’t know you were going to do words that were barely words!” wails Janaye Henry. We did, and the show’s so good even the Australians have swiped it. / Erin Harrington
24. Aroha Bridge (2013–2019)
In my opinion, Aroha Bridge is the best television show our country has ever produced. The animated series, which has gained a cult following and won major awards such as the best web series at the Los Angeles Film Awards, was originally a comic strip called Hook Ups. Drawn by Jessica “Coco Solid” Hansell and appearing in weekly music magazine Volume, it followed twins Kōwhai and Monty Hook, but would soon morph into a 10-part web series named Aroha Bridge.
“When we started Aroha Bridge it was about making a work specific to the Aotearoa that we actually knew. Smart but suffering, broke but ever-optimistic, multicultural and tense,” Hansell wrote for The Spinoff in 2016. “Someone asked who the typical viewer was and I realised: it was for people who didn’t win a KFC giveaway beanie but will never give up the dream.”
Centred around the urban Māori Hook whānau, the series follows their adventures in the bustling, fictional suburb of Aroha Bridge, based on Māngere Bridge in South Auckland. It explores the complexities of racial politics and millennial Māori anxieties, while forcing us to laugh at ourselves, from the “coconut-latte-sipping, waist-trainer-wearing, shakti-mat-using mums in Ponsonby” to the people who buy $20 T-shirts to show their support for social causes.
I once stumbled upon an Aroha Bridge T-shirt in an op-shop and couldn’t believe my eyes. My fiancée (who loves the show maybe just as much as me) quickly claimed it as a prized possession, only wearing it on special occasions. Personally, I aspire to be just like Uncle Noogy, the twins’ activist uncle who exclusively speaks in te reo Māori. / Liam Rātana
23. Back of the Y Masterpiece Television (2001–2008)
In the 2000s, many New Zealand shows were made on the smell of an oily rag – but only one of those shows lit the rag on fire, tied it around their host, then pushed them down a flight of stairs in a shopping trolley. Back of the Y was a late-night half-hour shit-show made up of Jackass-style stunts, ass-rock live bands and whatever would stretch to the 22-minutes required by a TVNZ contract. It was golden.
Essentially a sketch show, Back of the Y was made up of the following segments:
- Bottlestore Galactica, a Battlestar Galactica parody;
- Vaseline Warriors, a Mad Max parody;
- C*ntstables, a Cops parody;
- Artswhole, a fine arts community report;
- and in between, basically any opportunity to hit someone with a moving car.
The brainchild of Matt Heath and Chris Stapp, Back of the Y had a long arc stretching from Otago Uni student projects to a full-length feature film in 2007. My own memories of the show stretch back to its debut on Triangle TV in 1998, where the university-era BOTY showed during the weekly marijuana decriminalisation lobbying programme. Gen X was a weird time.
Pushed into the relative limelight of a very late TVNZ slot, Back of the Y captured the worst excesses and greatest opportunities of the 90s-00s transition. Much like MTV’s Jackass, it revealed a breed of young man whose motivation to get on TV superseded any sense of physical pain. More energetic than grunge, but less reactive than punk, they became the garage rock scene for the media decade that lay ahead of them. Also, they filmed the show in a garage. / Daniel Taipua
22. Top of the Lake (2013–2017)
It’s easy to forget just what a big deal it was that Dame Jane Campion was making television. In 2012, the celebrated director began work on what remains her one and only contribution to the small screen: a small-town detective mystery set in the surrounds of Queenstown, with a second-season set in Sydney. Top of the Lake was co-pro that relied on overseas investment, there was plenty of behind-the-scenes wrangling as a pregnant Anna Paquin dropped out of the lead role, leading to the casting of Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss.
The series received rave reviews as soon as it launched, with words like “sad” and “haunting” used to describe Moss’ hunt for a serial sexual abuser. The mysterious South Island backdrop was used by Campion so often that it became a character itself. “One that will stick with you, for better or worse, for a long time,” said Collider, hinting at a chilling finale that, many years on, still makes me shudder. At 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, this remains among our highest-rated shows of all time. / Chris Schulz
21. Hōmai Te Pakipaki (2007–2015, 2024)
Talent shows saw a massive revival in the 2000s with the global success of the Idol franchise, The Voice, and Got Talent. These were all big-budget affairs with global deals and a promise of stardom, and a bit full-on to be honest. How about just having a sing? Get a waiata going? Giz a turn?
Hōmai Te Pakipaki brought the talent show back home, and back into the home every Friday night with a live studio audience and the chance for anyone to roll up and have a go. The format was a simple karaoke contest with a handful of everyday hopefuls voted upwards by text message, filmed in the same Māori Television studio where everything else was filmed.
The secret sauce for Hōmai Te Pakipaki was the contestants: very high chance of seeing a cousin on here, or at least a hapu connection, maybe a regional connect if you were a lonely guy. In any case, here were people who would be singing on a Friday night whether they were being filmed or not – it felt communal because it was communal.
Things would flash up a bit for the grand finals each year, where a $20,000 prize was available and filming moved to a larger venue. But real talent bears no mind of these trappings, and 2011 contestant Chad Chambers won the night while wearing his white gumboots from his freezing works job, holding his son in one arm while singing Rod Stewart.
Hearty and real, Hōmai Te Pakipaki was less about stardom and more about the stars among us. / Daniel Taipua
Monday: 100-81 | Tuesday: 80-61 | Wednesday: 60-41 | Today: 40-21 | Friday: 20-1