Starstruck (TVNZ OnDemand and TVNZ 2, from Wednesday)
Rose Matafeo bloody loves a romantic comedy. Her appreciation of the genre is deep and nerdy, extending far beyond the usual Nora Ephron touchstones back to before the abbreviation "rom com" even existed. And all of this manifests in her debut TV series Starstruck.
Like all the great rom coms it feels comforting and familiar, something to watch into your pyjamas and/or while eating a whole bag of chips. As a series, it feels like something you could easily watch in one sitting without leaving your bed.
Matafeo plays Jessie, a young woman with a New Zealand accent living in London and working part-time at a cinema with some nannying shifts on the side. Basically, it's the same frantically, self-deprecatingly funny version of Matafeo we saw in last year's award-winning stand-up special, Horndog.
Reluctantly dragged out on New Year's Eve by her best friend and flatmate Kate (Emma Sidi), whose attention is immediately consumed by a man who won't stop talking about all the different types of currency he owns, Jessie gets chatting to a charming bloke she meets in the men's toilets while avoiding the queue for the ladies'.
It's not until the next morning, trying to find a way out of his alarmingly nice flat, that she IDs him as Tom Kapoor (Nikesh Patel), the star of a blockbuster that appears from the poster to be titled 'Full Tank of Money'. It's Notting Hill with the roles reversed, and just about every other classic rom com to boot, as the pair keep crossing paths in a series of chance encounters.
It's clearly never going to work – "he's a famous actor," Kate tells Jessie when she arrives home, "and you're a little rat nobody." Anyone who's seen enough rom coms to know this simply isn't true will find a deeply satisfying watch in Starstruck.
Big Shot (Disney Plus)
John Stamos doesn't have the slightest interest in sport. So when you see him pick up a folding chair and throw it at a basketball ref in the opening scenes of Big Shot, just know that's pure acting. In the latest easy-watching series from prolific TV hitmaker David E Kelley, the one-time member of the Beach Boys plays an emotionally repressed college basketball coach who gets fired (for the chair-throwing) and ends up having to coach a private school girls' team, who of course have a valuable life lesson or two to teach him. Stamos, who is by all accounts very nice in real life, got in character for the role by staying in his trailer the whole time and never talking to any of the other actors.
The Nevers (Neon)
The new series from Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, multiple recent controversies that suggest he's not a very fun person to work with) is a sci-fi drama set in Victorian England, where a gang of women discover they have special powers. As usual, with great supernatural powers come great enemies, not to mention an important mission to save the world. Somewhere out there, probably in Ōamaru, there's a Buffy fan from way back who's now really into steampunk, and this show is all their wildest TV dreams come true.
Eat Well for Less NZ (TVNZ 1, 7:30pm Tuesday)
The local version of this age-old British standard was an undeniable hit when it came out last year. We'd been down the same healthy eating road a hundred times before, but never quite with the same playful tone struck by Michael van de Elzen and Ganesh Raj as the pair went rummaging through New Zealanders' shopping trolleys. If you picked up a few tips on how to save money or eat more vegetables along the way that's great, but mostly wasn't it just the chance to have a good old rummage through at other people's shopping and judge their eating habits that got us all hooked.
Movie of the Week: Things Heard & Seen (Netflix, from Thursday)
We don't talk enough about the part horror movies play in the urban-rural divide. Here's another one that makes moving to the country seem like a really bad idea, based on the acclaimed novel All Things Cease to Appear, by Elizabeth Brundage. It's about a couple of New Yorkers (Amanda Seyfried and James Norton) who escape to the country and a big old dairy farm – seems lovely at first, but rest assured things soon take an isolating and sinister turn. A good old-fashioned horror, like they used to make in the 70s.
From the Vault: Caravan of Courage (1984) (Disney Plus)
The Star Wars franchise was a major selling point for Disney Plus when the service launched here last year. While the original movies will be more than enough for most of us, they've also chucked in two rare made-for-TV Ewok-based spinoff movies from the 1980s. The first one, Caravan of Courage (aka The Ewok Adventure), is about the Ewoks helping a couple of lost kids find their parents after the family's space cruiser crash lands on the forest moon of Endor. There's also a sequel, released in 1985, and an animated Ewoks series too.
Podcast of the Week: The Improvement Association
In the US, voter fraud is often alleged but rarely proven. One of those rare cases happened in Bladen County, North Carolina in 2018, when a Republican candidate beat out his Democrat rival for a congressional seat only to be investigated on suspicion of absentee ballot fraud.
If that all sounds like it might be a bit dry for a podcast series, don't worry – The Improvement Association is made by the team behind the all-time great podcast series Serial and S-Town. This is their second series (after Nice White Parents) since being bought out by the New York Times, and once again they bring the story to life in a way few others could.
It's hosted by This American Life reporter Zoe Chace, who heads to Bladen County on the invitation of Horace Munn, a leader of a Black advocacy group that's been running Get Out the Vote campaigns there for decades, and been accused of voter fraud for almost as long. He's one of several great characters in the series, which, over the course of its five episodes, takes listeners deeper than they probably ever thought they wanted to get into rural American local body politics.
