Worrying about inequality. Excited about electric planes. A huge Jacinda fan. Duncan Greive talks to a rebooted Paul Henry. 

Rumours have circulated for more than a year that Paul Henry was mulling a return to TV. He left the medium in a huff after his comments were accurately reported in a still-astounding Canvas profile by Greg Bruce. Henry said ‘titties’ 12 times in the space of a minute, along with many other things, and decided the hell with it when a predictable and essentially engineered uproar ensued. That left The Paul Henry Show – an expensive multimedia production they’d built around him as a personality, as a force-of-broadcasting-nature – with a big hole in the middle.

Mostly, when you leave like that, you don’t get to come back. Yet he has left in some kind of disgrace before and returned every time – his hot mic talent is so undeniable that he has an essentially infinite supply of second chances. The last time I saw him he was hosting Three’s upfronts at the Northern Club, back when Three had upfronts, back when a media company could plausibly host an event at the Northern Club. It was a bit over three years ago. He was having the time of his life, electric, making even those who deeply loathed him shudder with laughter. Then he was gone, living in Palm Springs, getting married, being rich. 

Now he’s back. It doesn’t feel like many were asking for him, but he’s here all the same. Here to talk about what comes after the lockdown on a hastily-conceived new show called Rebuilding Paradise with Paul Henry. Despite what happened last time, his name’s in the title again, a privilege reserved for only the biggest stars – him and, like, Anika Moa. He’s talking about a reset, a new nation birthed from a crisis. To many, Henry is precisely the kind of person who should be left in the old world, with his longtime habit of joking about people’s names, appearance, and worse. Yet he appears quite markedly changed by the crisis, as so many of us have been. And relishing the opportunity to talk about how this country might change too.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity

Duncan Greive: Where are you right now, and who’s in your bubble?

Paul Henry: I’m actually at Three at the moment. So now I get to leave my bubble to come to work.

To what extent was that a motivating factor? Just the sheer boredom of lockdown?

Do you know if I’m entirely honest, it probably was a very small motivating factor.

Let’s flip that around. What were the rest of your motivating factors?

OK. The fact that I actually think this is the most important topic and I’ve seen a lot of, obviously there’s been wall-to-wall coverage of a pandemic and you know, thank god for it, but some of it is I think excessively negative. 

I think we have an extraordinary opportunity on which to build our future. Based on the fact that actually this pandemic is going to come to an end. What are we going to have when we get there? How are we going to pay for that future – and how are we gonna make our future better? Too many people are focused on getting back to what we had before.

What are some of the exact examples of what you see as the sunny side of what comes after this?

Well, I just think that we’re going to have to get used to the fact that, at least for the medium term, we are going to have to focus on a vibrant domestic economy. Certainly more vibrant than it has been in the past. So how do we achieve that and what do we make our new speciality? 

If we consider that tourism has to take a back seat for a while, which is a pretty safe bet, how do we make sure that the tourism that we offer the world in the future is better than it was? How do we create another niche – something else that we can lead the globe in? What reasonably might that be?

I know some people have suggested that we could be looking at exploiting renewable energy to a much greater extent. We are so incredibly positioned to become world leaders in renewable energy. Or in electric travel, not electric cars, electric travel. It just is one example, but there must be so many. And so what I want to do is get people on and not just in soundbites, really explore the possibilities. Because we have an extraordinary ability now to come together as we reset our economy and reset our society.

You sound enthusiastic about the possibilities of having almost an enforced tear down and rebuild. Has the crisis made you reconsider some of your prior views, or worldview?

No, not really. We don’t really have a choice. We have to, first of all, as a country, as a team, get together and decide where we reasonably want to be in six months, and 12 months and two years. And then we have to put a plan together to get there. 

There’s no choice on that. We actually absolutely have to do that. And you can do it several ways. You could just say the goal is to get back to where we were before. I think we can all be agreed that we can do better than that. And now it’s much easier to do better than that because we have to, we actually have to reset – we have to address the future.

So just sailing along is no longer possible. I think it would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t explore these options. A lot of people, without question, are going to lose their jobs. They personally will pay a very high price. We have to make sure that other jobs are there. Jobs that are more rewarding and more sustainable, not just for people that do them, but for society. For all of us.

You said that you haven’t changed your views but at times there you sounded more like James Shaw than the Paul Henry of old. Do you believe it has the potential to work across other vectors as well? Like inequality, say, rather than just on the business opportunity side?

I was thinking just the other day, all of us I think have undervalued shelf stackers who worked through the night. Now the people queuing two metres apart outside are surgeons and pilots – and we’re all totally dependent on the shelf stacker. I think these are things now that we are going to be more cognisant of than ever before. 

It is part of the reset. These are the kinds of conversations that I want to have on the programme. We stand a chance of coming out of this as a healthier society than we went into it. You do need resets every now and then, because you get off track.

Some of your colleagues have just taken a 15% pay cut. A week or so later, Paul Henry arrives. Did they fund your arrival? What would you say to those people who’ve just taken a bit of a bath who see this flash new hire?

I’ve come back to do this programme. That’s the reason I’ve come back. Am I doing it for free? No. Why? Because that would create a false economy. Am I doing it for great riches? No. Am I doing it because I want fame? No. I don’t want fame, I don’t need great riches. I’m doing it at a spectacularly discounted rate.

Lastly, can you give me a sense of how you think the government has handled the crisis to date? The way that they have navigated this incredibly historic few weeks?

The first thing I would say is I think the government has handled it extraordinarily well. Largely Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern, I think they’ve done a fabulous job. In terms of the wider parliament, you know, the members of parliament whose names we don’t know, we still don’t know them. Nothing much has changed there. The one thing that probably disappoints me is that there has been no effort to reduce the salaries, to expect parliamentarians to take a little bit of a hit in the pocket. And even though that’s a small thing, I think those things are representative. But that’s a very small point. I think they’ve done a spectacular job, actually a very timely job. And history, I think, will prove that to be correct.

Rebuilding Paradise with Paul Henry premieres on Monday April 20 at 9.30pm on Three

Sam Brooks reviews The Tiger King and I, which does little to rectify the damage and distortion done by the monster Netflix hit.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness arrived at exactly the right time. People were shutting their doors, washing their hands and turning on their screens, and what was waiting there for them? A bleached-haired, fake-tanned man in a sparkly jacket, posing next to a tiger. Five hours and 40 minutes later, it was all anybody who had watched it wanted to talk about. How did he hook in three husbands? She definitely did it, right? And did he really sing those songs? (Emotional manipulation and charisma, probably not, and absolutely not.)

The weeks following Tiger King have been exhausting, frankly. Not just because of the state of the world right now, but because social media has chewed up and spat out every conceivable angle on the show. We’ve had a full cycle of memes and hot takes, and Donald Trump has even (jokingly?) said that he might pardon Joe Exotic, the titular morally toxic king. The consensus seems to have settled somewhere around the conflicted zone: that the series is an entertaining, but ultimately empty experience that also exploits or distorts many of its subjects. In some ways, Netflix doing its own after-show seems quaintly like old media. We’ve already dissected it in our bubbles, physical and virtual – why do we need the network to do it as well?

The advantage of this particular after-show is being able to check in on some of the more popular, and least controversial characters from the series and find out what they think of their newfound fame (or notoriety). These include Exotic’s ex-husband John Finlay, journalist-cum-cowboy Rick Kirkham and fellow big cat owners Jeff and Lauren Lowe. It poses some of the questions that audiences have been gleefully asking (“why did you go back after a tiger bit off your arm?” being a pertinent one) and serves as a payoff to the wildly popular series, filmed entirely after the show dropped – that is, filmed in quarantine.

It’s a savvy choice to get Joel McHale (The Soup, Community) to front it. He’s no hard-hitting journalist, but he seems genuinely curious about the lives of the people he’s interviewing, and injects the proceedings with enough snark that the audience doesn’t experience complete tonal whiplash from the original series. The only true misstep is when he suggests that his friend and Community co-star Ken Jeong should play trans man Saff (who was already misrepresented as a lesbian woman in the original series) in the inevitable dramatic adaptation, which shows McHale to be just as tone deaf as any other celebrity a few weeks into quarantine. You can’t help but wish someone with a bit more skin in the game was given the gig, but Netflix was never going to scrutinise its own golden goose (or tiger) too deeply.

That’s the crucial thing about The Tiger King and I. Not only is it a chance to wring the last bits of oil from the rag, it’s a chance for Netflix to do some image rehabilitation after the fact – to address topics that the original series didn’t, whether by design or by accident. It’s telling, and clearly intentional, that the after-show begins with the issue of animal cruelty, addressing it more directly than the original series ever did. McHale asks tiger handler Eric, one of the more sympathetic characters from the series, if any animal cruelty occurred at Joe Exotic’s tiger park. Eric’s answer? Yup, absolutely. To see Eric get emotional about the animals and the way they were treated puts a human face on the issue. It’s sad that we need a human face at all, but it’s revealing that in the first eight minutes of The Tiger King and I we get more compassion for those animals than we got in seven hours of the original series.

At the centre of The Tiger King and I are two giant holes: Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. Exotic’s absence is understandable, given that he’s in jail and will likely remain there for the rest of his life, according to several of his former employees and confidants. Baskin’s absence is more complicated, and tells us something about the show’s harmful approach to its talent. It’s a fairly damning indictment that the person who’s done worst from the Tiger King phenomenon is Baskin herself. There are now countless memes about her allegedly murdering her ex-husband, some of which are gleefully shared here, in another tone-deaf move from McHale. Going by online chatter – and a recent opinion poll – she’s more hated than anybody else in the series, even Exotic himself. As a documentary, Tiger King is hardly unique in this respect, but it’s worth pointing out that it made a martyr out of an unambiguous villain, and a gargoyle out of a woman who, while not morally spotless, seems to be guilty of little more than harmless eccentricity.

There’s only so much The Tiger King and I can do to paper over the damage done to everyone in the series. While McHale never asks what effect this newfound notoriety has had on the documentary’s participants, there’s only so many times you can hear not just one, but multiple interviewees insist they were not on meth before you start to question the decision-making behind the original series. After McHale jokes about both John Finlay’s missing teeth and his missing shirt in his documentary appearances, Finlay replies frustratedly: “I was portrayed as a drugged-out hillbilly. That was not me then. At that time, I was four to five years clean.” Too many people are put in the position of having to “well, actually” their own existence, and it never feels anything less than gross. It’s a welcome move to give more weight to the animal cruelty issue and to try to give us a fuller picture of some of the people involved, but The Tiger King and I was never going to go truly deep while fronted by Joel McHale, a 1.5K-faved tweet in human form. With him, snark always takes precedence over sympathy.

Tiger King isn’t the first Netflix docuseries to go huge, but it’s the first to achieve such a perfect storm of success. It scratched the true crime itch, which is a complicated brew of prurience and exploitation at the best of times. It dropped during a period when there was nothing else dominating screens, something Netflix has capitalised on (see: The Witcher, You) to huge success in the past. But perhaps most importantly, it gave people something to feel superior to. There’s a dark, uncomfortable classism to Tiger King that hooked us all in. We want to see how the other half lives, and in this case, Tiger King gave us a group of people who were every other half you could imagine, offering them up on a platter to be made fun of. The after-show tries to mitigate some of that (and it’s unsurprising that none of the documentary’s makers are credited or involved in any way), but it can only do so much when it’s bred from that same toxic piece of entertainment.

Nearly everybody involved seems conflicted, if not outright regretful, about their involvement in the documentary. Considering how shallow that product was, and how little that’s meaningful has apparently come out of it, you can’t help but wonder what the point of it all was. Tigers remain in captivity, as living, breathing, endangered MacGuffins. Joe Exotic remains in jail, more famous than he ever was and contentedly crowdfunding his legal battles. Everybody else continues to live their lives, a bit more exposed than before. The content machines keep churning.

You can watch The Tiger King and I on Netflix now.