New Netflix series Cowboy Bebop was shot over two years in New Zealand’s very own Tāmaki Makaurau. Longtime Auckland resident Sam Brooks scoured the series to figure out which local landmarks played roles in the fantasy space western.

Mild spoilers for Cowboy Bebop follow.

Just over two years ago, New Zealand got the news that the live-action adaptation of groundbreaking anime Cowboy Bebop would be shooting in our very own Tāmaki Makaurau. At the time, it sounded like an odd choice. How could Auckland possibly double for the full expanse of the solar system circa 2071?

Now that the series is out, it turns out the country’s largest city does the job pretty damn well. It seems the lack of planning that went into Auckland’s 20th century built landscape makes it the perfect stand-in for the messy sprawl of Cowboy Bebop after Earth goes to shit.

As someone who’s lived in the city for most of their life, I had my eagle eyes open to spot which bits of Tāmaki Makaurau turned up in the series. You can fool the world, Netflix, but you can’t pull the wool over my eyes (especially because I’ve been staring out my living room window at one of these locations for most of lockdown). Here are the places I spotted – I’m sure other residents will recognise even more.

Ardmore Airport

The first episode ends in a shootout between bounty hunters Jett and Spike and their prey, a seemingly pregnant woman on the run from her family and her drug- and rage-addled boyfriend. If you watch this scene and wonder why there’s a lot of old planes there, that’s because it was shot at Ardmore Airport, about 10 minutes outside of Papakura.

St Matthew’s Church

Episode two opens with Jett and Spike, still on the hunt for their target, crashing a wedding.

Where is that wedding taking place? It’s St Matthew’s Church, one of the most picturesque places of worship in Auckland. As a lapsed Catholic it pains me to hand that label to a Protestant church.

Cross Street

Episode three revolves around two story lines: Jett (Mustafa Shakir) searching for a very specific doll to give to his estranged daughter, and Spike hunting down a bounty who is wanted for stealing animals, but who keeps changing his face. This is your reminder that Cowboy Bebop is based on an anime.

The bulk of the episode is set in and around a sex club/brothel hybrid located on a street that looks a lot like Cross Street, with its distinctive corridors over the street. That’s because it was filmed on Cross Street.

Spark Arena

Look, if you want an interior location that looks like what an 80s architect thought of as futuristic, you should probably shoot at the Skyworld complex on Queen St. But if you need exterior shots you could do a whole lot worse than Spark Arena, which pops up for a few seconds when hostage Faye Valentine (Danielle Pineda) escapes from eco-terrorists in episode four.

Waitawa Regional Park

The final confrontation of episode four takes place at the most picturesque place in Auckland I’ve never heard of: Waitawa Regional Park. The location of my next socially distanced drink? Maybe!

Pah Homestead

During a scene in episode seven the three leaders of the Syndicate (including Mao, who is played by Rachel House) meet to plot and scheme, as you’d expect from characters who belong to a group calling themselves “the Syndicate”. 

The location of this meeting? Why, it’s Pah Homestead, the glamorous Hillsborough art gallery. The spaceship, presumably, is CGI.

Silo Park

In the market for a location that has a lot of old grain silos to make it look industrial? Why, we have just the place for you. Silo Park on the Auckland waterfront pops up in episode six, when the gang is helping Faye find her identikit so she can figure out who she is. This is another reminder that Cowboy Bebop is based on an anime.

Bluestone Room (RIP)

For one brief moment in episode nine, a flashback episode that shows us what went down between Spike and series villain Vicious, we see a bunch of people lined up outside a familiar stone building in the Auckland CBD. Specifically one on Durham Lane.

It’s the place that used to be known as the Bluestone Room, which my colleagues tell me did a “mean quiz” and was a “very cold, cave-like tavern”. 

Kingsland train station

In the same flashback episode, Spike and Vicious go to a nightclub where they both first set eyes on Julia. But what Auckland location is the backdrop as the two former friends walk past the Syndicate’s intimidating thugs? Why, it’s the Kingsland train station (Taiko Kingsland, an excellent Japanese restaurant, gets a cameo too).

Atlas Concrete

I don’t know exactly where this is, but I’m just pleased that Atlas Concrete has survived not just the 20th century, but the collapse of Planet Earth. Take that, Amazon!

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.