spinofflive
Screen Shot 2018-09-21 at 2.13.22 PM

Pop CultureSeptember 23, 2018

Comedy Pilot Week is upon us. Here’s what you need to know

Screen Shot 2018-09-21 at 2.13.22 PM

Three’s Comedy Pilot Week starts this Sunday night on Three – but what is this newfangled thing? Sam Brooks gives you the low down.

Five new shows over four nights? Isn’t there already enough TV to consume?

Yes, reader, there is. But this one is worth your time, even in this age of peak TV, which is media-talk for ‘literally if you spent your entire day watching all the TV someone tells you to watch, you would still not get through even a fraction of it’.

Three’s Comedy Pilot Week is based on a format that the ABC network in Australia pioneered last year. What happens is that a whole bunch of people make pilots (that’s industry speak for first episodes, which is kind of like a proof of concept) which are then broadcast for an entire week. The decision of which show goes to series (that’s industry speak for ‘gets more episodes’) is made based on ratings and public votes. These votes are collated through social media, with the handy and sensible hashtag #ComedyPilotWeek.

It’s kind of a genius idea, and it’s a way to gauge response to your show without shilling out an entire NZ on Air grant. You invest a little bit widely, gauge response, and then invest big in the one that does well.

But enough commentary on the idea and how genius it is – it’s only genius if it works and only genius if the shows are good. So what are the actual shows?

Luckily for you, I’ve got you covered on what the shows are, when they’re on, who made them, who’s in them, and all the information you could possibly want!

Mean Mums screens on Sunday night ad stars Morgana O’Reilly, Anna Julienne and Aroha Rawson.

Mean Mums (Sunday night, 8:30PM)

What’s it about?

Jess’ only son starts school, and with school comes a world of know-it-all, judgmental, passive-aggressive women. Hilarity likely ensues.

Who made it?

South Pacific Pictures, venerable makers of shows such as Shortland Street and Westside. The writer is Amanda Alison, who also wrote Three’s web-series for children ‘Lucy Lewis Can’t Lose‘.

Who’s in it?

Morgana O’Reilly plays Jess, who you might remember from being campily fabulous and fantastic as a villain on Neighbours, or making a mark as New Zealand’s best (and potentially only) Scream Queen™ in Housebound. The other leads are Anna Julienne, who is likely still most famous for playing fan favourite Maia on Shortland Street, and Aroha Rawson, who was fantastic in Mahana and it’s frankly awesome to see her in a lead role.

Sidelines premieres on Monday, and stars Nick Rado, Tarun Mohambai and Cohen Holloway.

Sidelines (Monday night, 8:30PM)

What’s it about?

Sidelines follows four parents who are reluctantly forced together every Saturday morning because their children play sports together. Hilarity, obviously, ensues.

Who made it?

The production company is The Laugh Club – and the writers are Nick Rado and Tarun Mohambai, who also write for 7 Days, which you might know as one of the shows that air before The Spinoff TV.

Who’s in it?

Rado and Mohambai are in it themselves, along with Cohen Holloway (who also stars in Mangere Vice) and Kiwis of Snapchat sensation Tom Sainsbury.

The Lonely Hearts airs on Monday and stars bonafide New Zealand icon Ginette McDonald.

The Lonely Hearts Motel (Monday night, 9PM)

What’s it about?

A mum and son run a weird-as-hell looking hotel in Palmerston North that’s about to get closed, when another son and his partner show up to save the day. Hilarity, yes, ensues.

Who made it?

The show is produced by Brown Sugar Apple Grunt Productions. It was written by Millen Baird and Siobhan Marshall, Auckland Daze writer and the actress who played Pascalle in Outrageous Fortune! Baird co-directed it with Kiel McNaughton who was one of the writers and producers of Auckland Daze as well, and McNaughton co-produced it with Kerry Warkia. Warkia and McNaughton are a producing super couple who brought us last year’s tremendous, Waru.

In short: These people have all worked together a lot. The tapestry of the New Zealand television industry is an overlapping one.

Who’s in it?

New Zealand legend Ginette McDonald plays the mum, Baird himself plays the son. They’re supported by Toby Sharpe, Fasitua Amosa, and Spinoff favourite Angella Dravid.

Golden Boy airs on Tuesday and stars Hayley Sproull, Dean O’Gorman and Kimberly Crossman.

Golden Boy (Tuesday night, 8:30PM)

What’s it about?

A big city journalist gets fired from her job. She returns to her small town where she’s kept under the shadow of her brother, a newly minted All Black.

Who made it? 

It’s produced by Mediaworks Ltd! The writers are Alice Snedden, Nic Sampson, Eli Matthewson and Thomas Ward. The first three are writers for Jono and Ben and Funny Girls, while Thomas Ward comes with (if my googling is correct) a pedigree from Australian series Please Like Me. It’s also directed by Jackie Van Beek, director of The Breaker-Upperers.

Who’s in it?

The multi-talented actress-slash-Bake-Off-host-slash-comedian Hayley Sproull plays Mitch, and the rest of the cast is rounded out with Dean O’Gorman, Angella Dravid, Kimberly Crossman and Boy himself James Rolleston.

Mangere Vice airs on Wednesday, and stars Cohen Holloway and Iaheto Ah Hi.

Mangere Vice (Wednesday night, 8:30PM)

What’s it about?

It’s a parody cop show set in the mean streets of South Auckland, following the travails of street-smart detective Robbie Kingi and his new partner – a preppy church boy from Epsom, Detective Povi Va’a. Hilarity, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by this point, does ensue.

Who made it?

Adrenalin Group, who also made the Stacey Morrison fronted show Whanau Living and popular doco-series Aotearoa. It’s created by Bradley Walker, who worked on the aforementioned shows, and written by Damon Fepulea’i, who’s directed many documentary-type things, as well as popular New Zealand short film Watermark.

Who’s in it?

Cohen Holloway! Iaheto Ah Hi! Breaker-Upperers break-out Ana Scotney! New Zealand legend Rachel House! A whole bunch of cool people, essentially.

You can watch the trailers for all these shows right here at Three

Keep going!
BROCKHAMPTON AT LOGAN CAMPBELL CENTRE, AUCKLAND, 21 SEPTEMBER 2018 (PHOTO: YOUTUBE)
BROCKHAMPTON AT LOGAN CAMPBELL CENTRE, AUCKLAND, 21 SEPTEMBER 2018 (PHOTO: YOUTUBE)

Pop CultureSeptember 22, 2018

Last night the boyband Brockhampton set Auckland on fire

BROCKHAMPTON AT LOGAN CAMPBELL CENTRE, AUCKLAND, 21 SEPTEMBER 2018 (PHOTO: YOUTUBE)
BROCKHAMPTON AT LOGAN CAMPBELL CENTRE, AUCKLAND, 21 SEPTEMBER 2018 (PHOTO: YOUTUBE)

Brockhampton are a new breed of boyband who have quickly risen from a Kanye messageboard to a multi-million-dollar record deal. Reilly Hodson reviews their new album, documentary and concert in Auckland last night.

“I think that we wake up every morning and think about what we can make to make people happy,” says Kevin Abstract, the de facto frontman for Brockhampton, to the packed crowd at the Hollywood Cinema in Avondale. We’ve just seen their documentary, The Longest Summer in America, and everyone is fizzing.

The last few years have been a wild ride for Brockhampton. They’ve released five albums, recorded a bunch more that never came out, signed a major label deal, kicked out a core member, recorded at Abbey Road, and now they’re in New Zealand, playing Auckland on the release day of their major label debut, Iridescence.

In many ways, Brockhampton is a microcosm of the journey that pop culture has taken over the past few years. They’re a boyband in a way that redefines the term, encompassing vocals, production, design, film-making and more. They met on a Kanye West fan forum, and their music is probably best described as post-Kanye. They make hip-hop music, but some of the songs don’t have raps, and their inspirations include My Chemical Romance and Mariah Carey. Their music stems from a life lived online, from growing up with the history of pop music instantly accessible. Their very existence delivers on the promise we’ve always been given about new technology: that you can do anything you want, with no barriers to entry.

The Longest Summer in America follows Brockhampton’s tumultuous journey since the close of their Saturation trilogy, three albums released in a six-month span that saw them explode into mainstream recognition. The first words we hear are from Abstract, “everything was perfect at that moment.”

We’re shown a montage of joy, the band having come off an immensely successful year and throwing themselves back into their work. They’re playing in the pool at the Beverley Hills home where they live together (the “Brockhampton Factory”), shooting lookbooks for a new merch line, and spending their every spare moment making music. And the songs are really, really good. At one point, we get shown the fully shot video for a track called ‘Ready for War’, a song which will never see official release, but which sums them up as a group so well: it’s a banger, but dives pretty deeply into their personal experiences, the joy and stresses that come from their new $15 million deal with RCA. In a heartbreaking turn for the audience, who all know what’s coming, Ameer Vann raps about his suicidal thoughts and struggles with depression, and how being a member of the group saved his life.

The group heads back out on tour, playing Coachella and other festivals, and while they’re on the road a bombshell gets dropped on them all. Ameer is the subject of a number of allegations, including sexual abuse and statutory rape. The scenes that follow are extremely tough. Various members recount the events, breaking down at the memory. After some handwringing, the band decide to perform without Ameer at the Boston Calling festival, without having time to cut his verses out of the instrumentals. The band break down on stage, and after an argument in the rain, Ameer is gone for good.

For the remainder of the film, the group grapple with their complicity in Ameer’s alleged wrongdoing and their responses afterwards, and an attempt to recover artistically. It’s a frank and moving experience, to see these guys, none of whom are older than 23, come to terms with the fact that a good friend, a brother, could have done these terrible things, and that they defended him without hesitation. They eventually head back on tour on the back of some new singles and end up in London, where they shack up at Abbey Road for 10 days to make a new record, Iridescence, which they say is the culmination of all of their highs and lows over the past year.

Joba says at the Q&A after the screening that “at some point, the art that you make validates you to your core”, and that’s his goal with any body of work. Iridescence, more so than the Saturation trilogy or any of their previous work, feels like just that. It’s quite a departure from Saturations 1-3, with a lot more sonic experimentation from the group, and many members stepping outside of their pre-defined roles. Romil Hemnani, the mastermind producer behind most of the songs along with Jabari Manwa, is a wizard on this album, flipping songs and creating the sonic journey of the album, through the highs and lows, the bangers and the songs that make you want to curl up and cry. Every once in a while, part of a song makes you sit bolt upright like “did that really just happen?”

The group say that their experience on tour in Europe re-energised them for the album, and you can feel the influence of Europe and the UK all over the tracks. The beats borrow from rave and grime culture, and the “ghosts” Romil says he felt in the room at Abbey Road feel like they were on his mind. In the documentary, he particularly notes that Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Amy Winehouse’s last songs, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon were all recorded in that room. It’s a pretty broad set of influences, but if Brockhampton is anything, it’s that.

Iridescence is a barnstorming romp of an album at times, but it has an intense emotional depth on repeat listening. Particularly with the context of the documentary, I caught myself every once in a while crying while bopping up and down to the beats. Even the songs that feel at the first glance like straightforward bangers have some heavy lyrical content. ‘TONYA’ is the song they wrote in Hawaii after the Ameer scandal, and it’s beautiful. The boys come to terms with what fame has done to them, and the feeling of powerless that came after everything that went down. It’s a song that will break you down into pieces and you won’t be able to get it out of your head. There’s a reason that many of the members say it’s the most significant song they’ve written.

Another high point on the album is ‘WEIGHT’, where Kevin goes deep on when he realised he was gay, and Dom McLennon goes deep on his struggles with mental health. Dom broke down during his verse when they performed it live for the first time at the Logan Campbell Centre, a moment he described afterwards on Twitter as “the fog in your head clearing for the first time.” It was a pretty affecting moment to watch, and the song is one of the best examples of a sad boy tune I’ve heard.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Jordan O’Longargain (@jordan_ol) on

The following night, Brockhampton used their sold-out show at the Logan Campbell to play the whole of Iridescence start to finish. It was a strange start, as, since the album had been out for less than 24 hours at that point, no one really knew the songs. That fact compounded with some sound issues that meant that you couldn’t really hear any of the vocals despite being right in the middle of the room meant that the show wasn’t exactly off on a great foot from a the audience’s point of view.

But Brockhampton are absolutely pro performers. Sound issues notwithstanding, they delivered a slick performance, and although Bearface and Kevin Abstract apologised for being less than perfect on Twitter while we were still in the carpark, you could tell they were giving it their all. I’ve watched a number of their older performances online, and the show on Friday felt like a completely different group. They had thought out their staging, and mostly just felt way more comfortable on the stage than they had at other shows. They can’t really dance, but they do anyway in that way that people do when they’re completely possessed by a great piece of music. It felt organic and real, and most of all, fun.

When the album finished, they started to roll out the hits, and that’s when everything turned the fuck up. It’s amazing the difference everyone knowing the words and songs will make on a show, and this crowd knew all the words. It didn’t matter that they’d been jumping and screaming for an hour at that point, everything just turned up to 11. Any sound issues went out the window and everyone joined together to get down to this group of 22-something weirdos who, for whatever reason, in whatever way, had changed their lives. It was a pretty awesome thing to be a part of. (Also, I didn’t hear any white people singing along with the N-word, so that was positive.)

At one point, in between songs, members of the group started a lyric and just saw how long the crowd would continue. You could see their surprise as we kept going until they stopped us. When they finally went off, and the lights came up, there was the longest chant for an encore that I’ve ever witnessed. Call it naivety and a young crowd who don’t realise that once the house lights are up that’s it, but I think it’s just because they didn’t want to believe that it was over.

 

But wait there's more!