Everyone thinks their parents are the funniest people in the world, but it's simply impossible for all of us to be right. If you've ever snorted at a weird, over-sharing text message, or gently hidden a particularly confused Facebook comment, I guarantee that Subject: Dad is essential viewing for you, the mortified sons and daughters of New Zealand.
With a new episode available on Three Now every Saturday night, Josh Thomson (The Project, 7 Days) reads out emails from his dad to a rotating cast of his comedian mates. Think Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee but unmoving, and with a soda stream machine in the background.
Once we are introduced to David, Thomson's weird and wonderful father who still potters about on their family farm, it's clear there's nothing but playful affection for the Timaru local. And what a character he is, a beanie-wearing hoarder and handyman who wouldn't look out of the place in Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
As Thomson narrates his dad's meticulously detailed reports from the farm to his famous friends, we cut to re-enactments of David Thomson eating broad beans on toast to melting lead nails to make sinkers. This is a man who keeps dry cereal in the fridge, frees dead cats from car grills and drinks rum and Thriftee at night. You simply couldn't make him up.
Lifting a similar popular style of dramatic recreation from True Story with Hamish and Andy, or Comedy Central's Drunk History, these re-enactments are not only ridiculously funny, but framed with all the charm, symmetry and whimsy that would make Wes Anderson jealous. With a bright yellow beanie on, David builds an elaborate, hokey contraption in the paddock to fire fishing weights out to sea.
