The good news is that Dirty Laundry is better. More naturalistic, with an infinitely more plausible plot and a thread involving child custody, which was unexpectedly raw - though not always intentionally so.
For some unaccountable reason these shows always seem to start with the death of a dude, leaving a matriarch-type figure to hold it down in their absence. The variation here is the near-death of Uncle Trevor, a loveable crime boss (sounds familiar too, huh) during his arrest, flowing into the arrest of Donna Rafferty, his suburban book-keeper and money launderer.
The top of the episode is corny in the way that New Zealand shows always seem to be on opening, trying to cram too much in, out of a desperation to keep the audience from running away early.
Here's what happens in the opening 10 minutes or so: two arrests, two engagements, two heart attacks, and most shockingly of all, two young people buying an Auckland home.
The latter is actually the most gratuitously weird part - they get a lovely brick and tile house for $690,000, which is basically science fiction at this point, and has been for years.
When we return to earth, we're dealing with the aftermath of the arrest of the family matriarch Donna (played with a stoic subtlety by Jennifer Ward-Lealand) on money laundering charges. It's a shattering event for the Rafferty family, who already dealt with the loss of their father some years before. The whole season is set up from here - a tension between the individual and collective, moral and legal codes and picking between two bad choices.
It's the subplot which is most vital, even though it's got some deeply problematic elements. Brother Matt, played with a scattered intensity by Tim Carlsen, heads over to his ex-partner's house unexpectedly to drop off his son (who cross-dresses, a cool element rightly never explained). On arrival, the kid says "there's a man hurting mummy". The pair emerge, post-root, and Matt attacks the new boyfriend.
He and the kid's mother are separated, and this amounts to the kind of controlling domestic assault which has a profound and appalling impact on women and their children all over the country. Yet here it's played for laughs - this comical guy, having a wrestle with "Dan the meat man". "She used to be vegan!" he says, in exasperation.
It's a bleak normalising of domestic violence, in which Matt is presented as a wronged party - or at the very least a highly sympathetic figure. Contrast that with the Housewives response to off-the-cuff racism - I know which production handled a social problem better.
As terrible as that scene is though, it leads to moments of real power, played very straight: him furious in a café, the pair trying to bribe the kid with treats after school. It's the kind of tense custody battle which tens of thousands of New Zealanders play out every day, and is only rarely glimpsed on screen. It's just a shame they botched the opening in such a lame and damaging way.
The show's other problems are so familiar as to barely need recounting, mainly connected to appallingly dated dialogue. "It's great for my cred"; "Take the rap for him"; "Reefer madness"; "We're munted" - that familiar faded facsimile of self-consciously New Zealand slang, of which co-showrunner Gavin Strawhan is excessively fond. It sits dead in the actors' mouths, and undermines the otherwise fine work done by the cast, crew and directors.
Which is a shame. Because Dirty Laundry, for all its many faults, also indicates we have the technical capacity to create fresh, vital modern drama. And that brand new production companies can come together in short order and deliver international-looking work. But while the same old writers make the same old shows, over and over again, we're going to keep getting these same broken shows. And we, as a nation, deserve better than this.
