The only really surprising thing about Agent Anna (tonight, TV One, 8.30pm) is that it took so long for somebody to make a comedy about Auckland's overheated real estate market. Bad luck for our real estate agent mate that the day after she emailed me to say, hey, she'd had a really good idea for a telly series about real estate agents, the imminent arrival of Agent Anna was announced. (What a terrible title; it sounds like a series about a schizo CIA agent starring, possibly, a good-looking but mad-as-a-cut-snake blonde sheila. Oh. We've already seen that one.)
As it happens, our real estate agent mate is blonde, like Anna - she sold our house recently and became a mate although everybody said, "You can't be friends with a real estate agent," in tones which suggested we'd become chums with a mass murderer.
Our friend is also - how to put this - a bit cuckoo in an endearing way, and fortunately she endeared a large number of people to come to our auction and also go a bit cuckoo. The episode on day one of our relationship whereby she dropped the keys down a crack in the deck the width of a 10c piece (no, we have no idea how, and neither does she) has long been forgotten. Almost.
Anyway, you could make a telly series about this sort of stuff and somebody has. Its star is Robyn Malcolm - who I think may have been married to a real estate agent - which is possibly why it's just a little snarky about real estate agents. But they are ripe pickings, regardless. Everybody hates them because they are widely held to be wolves and rogues. This is possibly why we like ours so much: they make journalists appear almost loveable by comparison. As does Anna.
She is a bit of a sad-sack who has to get a job after her swinish husband runs off leaving her with two kids, his debts and a mortgagee sale. She and the kids have to move into the downstairs of her parents' house; she has a nag of a mother and a long-suffering father.
