Pop CultureMay 28, 2021

Suzanne Paul’s greatest TV cameos, reviewed and ranked

Staff writer

Suzanne Paul is known as New Zealand’s infomercial queen, but wait – there’s more. She’s also the queen of the cameo.

Suzanne Paul once lifted an SUV off the ground with a vacuum cleaner. She sold us vibrating pillows, launched a fancy gold clip that worked on both scarves and shoes, and gave New Zealand it’s Natural Glow. She changed our television landscape forever, and then conquered the shows between the ads: Dancing with the Stars, Intrepid Journeys, Celebrity Treasure Island. Now, she’s about to go global. Tomorrow night, Suzanne Paul will make her biggest cameo yet by appearing alongside judge Michelle Visage on RuPaul’s Drag Race: Down Under.

A sneak peek at Queen Suzanne’s appearance on Drag Race Down Under tomorrow night, with judge Michelle Visage

The Down Under appearance is the latest in a decades-long series of glorious Suzanne Paul cameos. When you least expect it, Suzanne Paul will appear from nowhere, have a lovely time and then disappear again having made the world a whole lot brighter. She’s a human Suzanne Clip, a timeless gem who transforms an everyday item into something special. She’s the queen of the cameo; she’s the cameo creme.

Such Suzanne Paul cameos are rare and precious jewels, so call now, don’t delay, we have ranked them for a strictly limited time.

10) Bakery Run (2021)

“I’m not really a pie person,” Suzanne Paul says in this YouTube series about people eating pies. This is Suzanne’s most unassuming cameo, as she chats her way through a Thai Coconut pie (7.5/10), a Steak and Cheese (10/10) and a tasty slice of White Chocolate Brownie (official verdict: moist). “You get a free set of steak knives with every pie!” she says, cackling into her crust. Reader, you do not.

9) Being Eve (2001)

Suzanne’s most inspiring cameo appears in award-winning Kiwi teen drama Being Eve, where she pops up as craft queen and life coach Suzy Sonnenschein. Suzy dolls out timeless advice like “little things, they’re small, aren’t they? Wrong,” and transforms doilies into hair accessories that inspire people to be better listeners. It’s something we all needed in 2001.

8) Blind Date (1989)

Before Suzanne Paul was Suzanne Paul, she was Susan Barnes looking for love on classic 80s dating show Blind Date. It’s Suzanne’s earliest TV cameo, and while she didn’t win the date with the dairy farmer, she did take home some exfoliating body scrub “for new skin” as a consolation prize. New skin? Full of… luminous spheres?! This could be the start of a beautiful thing.

7) The ‘I Only Want to be with 2’ TV2 promo (2000)

Suzanne holds a garage sale in this delightfully nonsensical TVNZ promo, because it’s a new millennium and Suzanne Paul can do whatever the heck she wants. Ellen Crozier buys a TV with a carry handle, and later, a penguin drives a bus. Can you see Suzanne’s halo? An angel amidst the chaos.

6) Outrageous Fortune (2009)

It’s the Best Bag Ever, and who better to help Pascalle West sell it on the telly than infomercial guru Suzanne Paul? Yes, Suzanne had to spill the contents of her handbag in front of the nation, but $299.99 for a handbag that holds both your tampons and your MP3 player? It really is the Best Bag Ever.

5) ‘This Could Be The Night’ by Ron Cribb feat. Chikonabz (2015)

There’s a lot going on in this intriguing music video, but there’s no better moment than when Suzanne Paul appears to dance with a superhero in a nightclub stairwell. She doesn’t say a word, but we know it’s her. Those stylish kicks, that natural glow, the way she clings to Superman like he’s a vibrating massage pillow and she’s an inflamed sciatic nerve. Lois Lane could never.

4) The Cafe (2016)

The Queen takes her rightful place on the throne. Sorry Holly, there can only be one.

3) Get it to Te Papa (2018)

A fleeting glimpse of Suzanne Paul is never enough, so it’s understandable The Spinoff’s own Hayden Donnell attempted to capture her essence forever during an episode of internationally acclaimed documentary series Get it to Te Papa. Donnell attempted to make Suzanne into a human exhibit, but this is one luminous sphere who will never be contained.

3) Dog Almighty (2020)

Nothing sums up 2020 better than Suzanne Paul appearing on primetime TV just to push a dog in a wheelbarrow. That’s all Suzanne did on Dog Almighty, and nobody has ever moved an Alsatian in a bucket with such style and enthusiasm. It may have looked like just another slippery stroll down the athletics track of life, but Suzanne was so convincing that if an 0800 number had flashed up on the screen, I’d have called it immediately.

2) JessB’s ‘Set it Off’ video (2018)

Suzanne moves like a gazelle in rapper JessB’s 2018 gem of a video, throwing her authority around like it’s a bowling ball and the court is her Bambillo pillow. Her tracksuit is magnificent, her whistle control outstanding. She’s a leader, a role model, a pelvis-thrusting superstar swaddled in the soft embrace of maroon velour. Suzanne Paul is here to teach you the RULES, bitches.

1) Stranger Danger with Scribe (2010)

Let’s face it, Suzy P was born to be gangsta. It’s the pairing we never dared to dream of, but this cameo from C4’s The Jono Project works better than a quick dusting of Thin Lizzy. Scribe takes the lead, but Suzy P’s contribution to both hip hop and community safety mustn’t be underestimated, mostly because she tells kids to “punch that fool in his bulging blue monkey”. Rules to live by, indeed.

Follow The Spinoff’s reality TV podcast The Real Pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

Keep going!

The cast of Friends, in the same room together for the first time in 17 years.

Pop CultureMay 27, 2021

The highs, lows and whoas of the Friends reunion

Sam Brooks

Contributing writer

The cast of Friends, in the same room together for the first time in 17 years.

For the first time in 17 years, the six Friends have reunited on the Central Perk couch to look back at the television comedy that made them stars. These were the highlights – and lowlights

“How you doin’?”

Thanks for asking, Joey. Truth is, after watching the Friends reunion, I’m having a lot of feelings! Tonight, for the first time since 2004, the six Friends got together to remember their era-defining roles in the biggest sitcom of all time. The 104 minute affair consisted of several segments spliced together: an interview with the stars in front of a live audience, a visit to the old sets, a few table reads, and testimonies from both famous and non-famous fans.

Does it sound disjointed to you? That’s because it was. But it was still 104 more minutes of Friends (sort of). I’ll take what I can get.

I got to watch the special a few hours before it aired and have picked out the highs, the lows, and the bits that made me gasp loudly at my desk (sorry, Spinoff coworkers).

HIGH: Matt LeBlanc!

Everybody seems pretty happy to be there, but my lord, Matt LeBlanc is absolutely stoked about this. He immediately admits to having watched the entire series, while the others shrug and mumble about missing a few seasons here and there. Out of all of them, he’s the quickest to remember details, and definitely the most game to do the silly stunts, including walking the runway during the fashion show segment (inexplicable, but fun) in “all of Chandler’s clothes”.

The best moment, though, has to be where they go to the parts of the set that the cast and crew all signed on the last day of filming. LeBlanc’s sign-off? “I shit here.” It’s almost enough to make me want to watch Joey (not quite, though).

LOW: James Corden!

Effortlessly funny. Easy to watch. Tolerable.

Those are all descriptions of Friends that you could absolutely not apply to James Corden, who HBO Max tapped to host the live interview portion of the special. Corden brings his trademark foghorn approach to the gig, and further convinced me that his continued American success must be an MI6 plot to keep him away from the UK.

At best, he’s an on screen reminder of how rare it is to bring together six actors with such easy charisma and compelling chemistry. At worst, he’s… on screen.

WHOA: David Schwimmer really hated that monkey

It’s common knowledge among Friends fans that nobody really liked working with the monkey, but my god, David Schwimmer goes in on Marcel, Ross’s pet monkey in the first season. When an audience member asks what the worst thing about working on Friends was, everybody is pretty chill except Schwimmer, who goes into great detail about how the monkey’s handler would feed it live grubs while it was on his shoulder, and the monkey would then rip them in half, eat them, and wipe its juice-covered paws all over Schwimmer.

Katie, the monkey who played Marcel, is still alive and working. She did not make an appearance at the reunion.

LOW: It’s all a bit too slick

When the credits roll at the end of the nearly two hour special, it’s not a huge surprise that all six Friends are listed as executive producers. This isn’t a Real Housewives reunion special, with wine thrown and feuds unearthed (simians aside). The purpose of this reunion isn’t to uncover gossip but to underline Friends’ role as a cultural institution, and remind us all how big this show was, and continues to be. There’s even testimonies from people around the world about how the series got them through tough times, and I mean, same here, but I don’t need to be reminded it was a big deal. The fact that this special exists, and managed to bump Shortland Street from its 7pm slot, is proof enough of that for me.

It’s a shame, because it works best when it’s just the six of them hanging out, reminiscing about old times and genuinely delighting in each other’s company. The audience doesn’t want a fashion show, they don’t want to see them play a trivia game about things they may or may not remember, and they don’t even really want all the juicy gossip (more on that below). No, they just want to see the friends sit around in those ridiculously huge, rent-controlled, apartments and shoot the shit.

HIGH: Definitive confirmation that Ross and Rachel were on a break

It’s the question that never got an answer: Were they on a break? (I say yes, but what Ross did was still shitty!)

All six actors immediately say variations on yes, absolutely, of course they were. Case closed!

WHOA: Lady Gaga!!!

Olivia Colman said it first: “Lady Gaga!!!”.

One of the genuine standout moments of the special is when Lisa Kudrow plays ‘Smelly Cat’ on the Central Perk set, snapping back into Phoebe at a moment’s notice. Halfway through, she’s joined by Lady GaGa and they perform a duet which deserves to have a million streams on Spotify by this time tomorrow, and then they’re joined by a full-on choir!

It’s bonkers, it’s wild, and obviously it’s completely staged, but it brought the small gay child inside of me joy, and the bitter gay adult outside of me even more joy. Then Gaga almost ruins it by essentially saying Phoebe Buffay taught her how to be weird, which brings me to another low…

LOW: All the other celebrities

The list of celebrities who are inexplicably in this special is as vast as it is truly random. It includes David Beckham, Mindy Kaling, Cara Delevingne, Cindy Crawford, Malala Yousafzai, Malala’s best friend Vee, and Justin Bieber, dressed above as “Spudnik”, Ross’s terrible idea for a Halloween costume.

But we’re not here for the celebrities! We can see them elsewhere! If I want to see Mindy Kaling, I’ll stream The Mindy Project. If I want to watch or listen to Justin Bieber, there are many YouTube videos with his face and voice in them. Less celebrities, more friends! (That’s also a good motto for life, really.)

HIGH: Ross and Rachel’s first kiss

It’s easy to forget, even after all these years, that these actors were really, really good at being these characters. The special has the cast read some of the best scenes from the series, including Phoebe finding out that Monica and Chandler are dating, and the slow reveal of the jellyfish secret.

However, the best of these, by which I mean the one that made me deplete my daily allocation of Kleenex, is when Schwimmer and Aniston read the scene where Ross and Rachel kiss for the first time. Not only do we get to see the actors – older and wiser, with all the emotional weight both those things bring – read a scene they nailed the first time around, we also get to see the scene as it was filmed intercut with their reading. It brings a surprisingly moving gravitas to what was already a legendary scene. Schwimmer and Aniston are not just performing the scene, they’re remembering it, and seeing them go through that is more poignant than I expected this special to get.

WHOA: David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston had feelings for each other

Yeah, this is the closest the special gets to revealing anything, in a way that feels utterly intentional. Corden asks the six if anything romantic happened behind the scenes, and Aniston lobs it over to Schwimmer, who admits that he and Aniston had a crush on each other, but because they were dating other people at the time, nothing ever really happened. Ships in the night, he says. In fact: the first time they kissed was onscreen! (LeBlanc coughs “bullshit!” so who knows.)

I don’t want to call bullshit myself, but the moment absolutely seems like dangling a piece of gristle in front of a hungry dog outside when you’ve got grocery bags full of scotch fillets in the kitchen. They give us one thing, barely even half a thing, so we won’t ask for any more.

It makes sense to me. If you’ve followed the careers of these people since, they’ve gone to great lengths to distinguish themselves after Friends, and with the exception of Aniston, to live largely private lives (as much as one can when drifting in and out of the A list). The press was not necessarily super pleasant to them in the 90s and 00s, and if they kept mum then, why the hell would they come out with the goss now?

HIGH: Just… the Friends, you guys.

I grew up with Friends. I don’t have a memory of TV without it, and it remained appointment watching for me well after its original run finished and it began airing in seemingly endless cycles at 6:30pm. The best episodes of Friends are some of the best episodes of television, ever. When it ended in 2004, it literally felt like I was losing some of my friends. (I was a 13 year old gay kid, I was dramatic.)

Along with millions of other people around the world, I would happily watch these six people do anything together. No show has really replicated the Friends formula since; there might be other ensembles as good, and shows that are bigger or funnier, but no sitcom has reached genuine cultural ubiquity like Friends has.

I teared up at the end of this special, because it felt like the final goodbye. There’s not going to be a movie. There’s not going to be a cringey Will and Grace-esque sequel series. Kudrow says flatly: “At my age, to say ‘floopy’? Stop! You have to grow up.” And there’s definitely not going to be another reunion. As Cox says definitively, “We’re not going to do this again in 15 years.”

The reunion wasn’t really for the six of them. They’ve all long moved on from this. No, it was for us. It was for the cheugies who still laugh when someone says ‘pivot!’ and the losers who, with nearly endless amounts of new TV to watch, will still boot up any random episode of this series for a laugh, and will continue doing so for decades to come. To quote the theme song from another timeless sitcom: Thank you for being a Friend.

The Friends reunion is available to watch on TVNZ OnDemand.

Follow The Spinoff’s pop cultural nostalgia podcast Remember When… on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.