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Search Party
Search Party, Tiger King and Black Summer, some of the shows that were started, but not finished, in 2021. Image: Getty/Tina Tiller

Pop CultureFebruary 9, 2022

In 2022, I pledge to finish some damn shows

Search Party
Search Party, Tiger King and Black Summer, some of the shows that were started, but not finished, in 2021. Image: Getty/Tina Tiller

Last year, I tried to scale the summit of peak TV. I failed. This year’s going to be different…

Standing against a dodgy backdrop, with a handheld camera pointing straight at his face, Cary Dubek twitches nervously as he stares down the lens. With equal parts eagerness and embarrassment, the wannabe actor prefaces his big audition, his moment to shine, his chance to break through, with an introduction. 

“Hi, I’m Cary Dubek and I’m reading for the role of ‘Man at party who smells fart’.”

That moment is when I thought I’d found it, the antidote to Auckland’s enforced five-month staycation of 2021. It comes in the first episode of The Other Two, last year’s hot lockdown binge-watch that follows the exploits of the two hapless siblings of a Justin Bieber-esque teen superstar called – what else? – Chase Dreams.

With great characters, a rapid joke count and vicious swings at the fame game, it took just one episode to fall in love. After another day working from home, emotions tied intimately with the 1pm announcements while failing at home cooking and home schooling, The Other Two was the perfect evening escape, a routine I looked forward to. 

Halfway through The Other Two’s second season, I ruthlessly stopped watching. I just straight up gave up. Quit. Done. Finito. I never went back.

The same thing happened with Search Party. Alia Shawkat is absolute dynamite in this shape-shifting show, one of my favourites from the past five years. It begins as a millennial missing-persons mystery but keeps reinventing itself, turning into a murderous misadventure, a courtroom drama and an examination of the fickle nature of friendship and the diabolical effects of fame.

How does it end? I don’t know. During the same 2021 lockdown, when Neon began screening its fourth season, I watched it, loved it, then inexplicably bailed. Once again, I was about halfway through. Once again, I had no apparent reason. I was out, onto the next thing.

Across last year, this exact thing happened dozens of times. Like a stressed out meerkat, my attention kept getting stolen by other things. Many critics hailed 2021 as the best yet for television, the absolute summit of peak TV.

I tried, I really did, to climb those peaks. I wanted to see what everyone was talking about. It was to no avail.

Here’s a short list of all of the TV shows I started, and did not finish, in 2021: Loki, The Righteous Gemstones, Good Grief, Foundation, Raised By Wolves, Yellowjackets, Only Murders in the Building, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Scenes From a Marriage, Allen v Farro, Ted Lasso, Dexter, Catfish, Immigration Nation, Tiger King’s second season, Dirty Money, Trapped, The Shrink Next Door, For All Mankind’s second season, Vigil, I Think You Should Leave, Mythic Quest, Master of None’s third season, Line of Duty’s first season, Wandavision, Mare of Easttown, The Panthers, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Invasion, Nine Perfect Strangers, What We Do in the Shadows, and Dopesick.  

(The Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That could also be on this list, but I lasted so little time – just long enough to hear Carrie say she makes podcasts now – that it didn’t seem fair.)

Here’s an even shorter list of all the shows I managed to finish: The White Lotus, Succession and Squid Game.

Why am I doing this? Why do I start, then quit, so many shows? What televisual nirvana am I searching for? I put this madness, this constant search for something new to take my mind off the mundane, down to the pandemic. The constant stress of, you know, staying alive, meant some things needed to take a back seat. For me, that was every TV  show I was watching, every couple of weeks. 

Or perhaps I was looking for just one thing: murderous mayhem and vicious savagery. By some country mile, my favourite show of 2021 was the relentlessly violent pandemic zombie survival show Black Summer. In it, main characters are offed regularly, everyone is a villain, blood is a given, and cameras zoom up so close you can see individual nose hairs twitch.

One of those survivors is Lance, an anxiety-riddled nice guy entirely unfit for pandemic life. He hangs in there, pathetically, until he doesn’t. The result is some of the most compelling television I’ve seen, so overwhelming and edge-of-your-seat thrilling it became impossible to think about anything else, like my own pandemic survival.

I loved Lance. I loved Black Summer. I loved every single second I spent watching that show.

I never finished it.

In 2022, I pledge to try harder. Has anyone heard anything good about Landscapers?

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Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureFebruary 8, 2022

AM is back and brighter than ever

Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Three’s old-but-new breakfast show AM returned to our screens this morning. Tara Ward set her alarm to watch. 

The show formerly known as The AM Show returned to Three this morning, with a brand new team in a brand new studio. Presenters Ryan Bridge, Melissa Chan-Green, Bernadine Oliver-Kerby and William Waiirua were fizzing with nerves, and Bernie reckoned none of them had slept due to the excitement. “I had to take a sleeping pill last night,” Ryan agreed. “This is not doctor’s advice,” said Melissa, and AM was off with a bang.

While Breakfast snazzed it up with their new fancy techno set, AM kept things real. The flash new desk was normal sized and the couch looked comfortable enough, but wrap on your sunglasses and slop on some sunscreen, because this studio is bright enough to burn. Blue and yellow colours everything from the walls to the coffee cups, but who doesn’t like sea and sunshine? Who doesn’t want a dazzling ride on AM’s colour wheel of life? Wake up, New Zealand, the news is on.

New roving weather reporter William Waiirua made his first live cross shortly after six o’clock, admitting he’d been up since two using the huge makeup kit the show gave him. This prompted the team to discuss the power of a good blow-dry, because Ryan is a late blow-dry convert. “The minute I got my hair blow-dried, I’m never going back,” he said. “You can blow-dry me all day long.”

Sadly, AM is only a three hour show, or three-and-a-half if you count AM Early, the 5.30am news bulletin with Bernadine. While Bernadine delivered the news and Ryan and Melissa discussed surf safety and pandemic preparedness, beautiful aerial photographs of New Zealand scenery floated slowly on the screens behind them. It was as if we were in space. We were orbiting the world of news, first stop Planet Sprinkle.

The story about a UK bakery being banned from using sprinkles may have broken in October last year, but AM knows sprinkles are timeless. Melissa interviewed Leeds baker Richard Myers – the self-declared “Pablo Escobar of sprinkles” – about the impact of sprinkle censorship on his business. Myers, a man of few words and even fewer sprinkles, only wanted his freedom back. “We stand with you,” Melissa told him, because nobody puts sprinkles in the corner and gets away with it.

Who says sprinkle chat is awkward? Not me, not AM, maybe Ryan Bridge. “I feel baked after that interview,” he said, before crossing to William, who was pointing a cordless drill at the camera and planting sage in someone’s backyard. William waxed lyrical about “the Earth’s girth”, a phrase you don’t hear early enough in the day at the best of times, before Ryan quizzed Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet about this week’s celebrity fashion statements. The segment gave off a late-90s Good Morning vibe, and all that was missing was someone faxing in to ask why we’re still publicly judging women for what they wear in the year of our Lorde 2022.

But amid the blow-drys and the bakeries, AM covered the important issues of the day. Covid-19 meant guests couldn’t come to the studio, so the power of the internet brought us a political panel discussing Labour’s win in the polls, an economist discussing the economy, and Nadia Lim persuading us to use lettuce leaves instead of burger buns. Even the prime minister checked in. “I’ve missed you, Ryan,” Jacinda Ardern said, but I don’t know if that was true. “We’ve missed you too, prime minister,” Ryan replied, but I don’t know if that was true, either.

Look, the news doesn’t lie, and AM wants to do us proud. “We’re going to bring you the best breakfast news out there,” Bridges promised at the top of the show. There may have been some awkward nerves, but there was also energy, colour and, most importantly, sprinkles. What more do you need from breakfast telly? Fax in your answers, we’ll read them after the break.

AM Early screens on Three each weekday at 5.30am, followed by AM at 6.00am


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