KEY POINTS:
It was a relief to see the corpse get a decent send-off in the final of Burying Brian last night as the curtain went down on the four friends and a funeral.
The six-part comedy-drama wasn't always an easy watch but you have to congratulate the makers for taking the fashionable female buddy genre and giving it a Kiwi twist.
In Sex and the City, the four friends became couture-wearing fashion icons. In Burying Brian, they all dressed like producer Julie Christie, whose dedication to low-cost telly extended to donating items from her own wardrobe.
Burying Brian was as Kiwiana as a sheepskin on a La-Z-Boy, right down to the walkshorts and socks on the nosy next-door neighbour. Unfortunately, it also had that less comfortable feature of much New Zealand drama, of lurching strangely from the farcical to the nasty. One minute we're laughing at a buffoonish, tyrannical parking warden, next he's Jake the Muss, slapping his wife around or threatening someone else with breaking ``every bone in your face'.
It's hard to pull off hybrid drama. As the premise of Burying Brian was completely over the top, it would have been stronger had the tone been kept light.
As it was, watching the whole thing was a bit of a chore. For all the plot twists, most predictable, there wasn't anything intriguing enough to get a body hooked.
And it's depressing to have yet another Kiwi drama with characters whose inner lives seem as shallow as the inadequate grave Brian was stuffed into by the panicking Jodie and her mates.
Still, it wasn't without its moments, mostly through the quality of the acting from the quartet led by Jodie Dorday. Ingrid Park, as a woman on the verge of driving herself off a cliff, even managed to be poignant through all the melodrama.
One highlight may not have been intentional. When cop Pete threatened to castrate young Josh for sleeping with Pete's daughter, he pronounced it ``car-strate', thus conjuring up an image of emasculating a teenage boy by taking away his wheels. Equally painful as the traditional procedure, possibly, given the country's thriving boy racer culture.
Another four female friends outing finishes next week, the short-lived Cashmere Mafia. The show lasted only seven episodes before it was canned in the US but that has not stopped TV2 from continuing to promo it as the pick of its ``new season' dramas. Talk about getting mileage out of a corpse. Despite its valiant attempt to woo women viewers with eyefuls of glamour clothing and precipitous heels, the show forgot to accessorise all those outfits with a half-decent script.
In the realm of professional women but on an entirely different note, CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour's In the Footsteps of Bin Laden, on the Documentary Channel on Sunday, is an intriguing examination of someone the United States would like to see dead and buried, preferably beneath a pile of rubble.
The first of the comprehensive two-parter had plenty of surprising revelations, such as reminiscences from a former boyhood friend of bin Laden, who described him as a quiet boy who played the peacemaker in street games of soccer.
Amanpour traces bin Laden's extraordinary progress to becoming the world's most wanted terrorist. It's a fascinating documentary, but would be even more so if Amanpour didn't deliver the whole thing with the relentlessly loud urgency of reporting a breaking news story.
Still in the Middle East, Palestine Street on Triangle and Stratos TV this and next Saturday, is a two-part al-Jazeera documentary which takes an intimate approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, through the lives of those forced to flee the once vibrant centre of Jaffa.
Sounds like an insightful alternative for anyone looking to escape being buried by the sports onslaught in Beijing.
