Never 4 life

Mario Gaoa. Photo / Supplied

By all accounts, it probably shouldn't have worked. Local comedies are a risky venture at the best of times, but embarking on bro'Town, a prime-time cartoon for adults that offends every creed and race indiscriminately, was a grand-scale gamble.

But work it has - spectacularly well. Five years after the debut of this little-show-which-could, writers Mario Gaoa, David Fane, Oscar Kightley and Shimpal Lelisi are calling time on what has been a trailblazing TV triumph.

"The success has been quite humbling," Gaoa tells View. "When we first started, we got a whole lot of emails from people, good and bad, and I thought, wow, maybe I can pay my rent for another six months at least. I was able to pay my rent for another five years."

All good things must come to an end, however, and the new series of bro'Town kicking off on TV3 tonight will be the last - at least, for now.

"We never had a cut-off date in our heads or a lifespan for bro'Town," says 37-year-old Gaoa, who voices Sione, God, Constable Bababiba, among others. "We thought, what can we do? How many more series do we think we have left? The consensus was that we should finish off on a high. But we've left it so if ever we decide to revisit it, we can."

Pondering the future was once a foreign concept for the Naked Samoans troupe, who idled between theatre gigs, "having such fun but making zero money", before striking mainstream success.

Bro'Town has literally changed their lives - and forced them to grow up.

"The biggest thing is that bro'Town has really allowed us all to get into a position in life of buying a house or having a family," says Gaoa, whose first child, Mali, was born in November. "We've grown up and grown older with bro'Town and now we're leaving bro'Town alone for, I don't know how long, which is a very big step for us."

Gaoa expects to see some emotion from his buddies when the final credits roll on the irreverent series.

"Some tears will be spilled in the last episode," he predicts. "If there's anybody going to cry it'll be Shimpal or possibly Dave - they do get very emotional." Although it didn't hit the mark with everyone, bro'Town attracted a legion of loyal fans. Its popularity was such that even Helen Clark and Rove McManus made vocal appearances. For Gaoa, the greatest source of pride has been the piles of emails from expats around the world, telling the awesome foursome that DVDs of the show made them homesick.

"In the writing process we weren't thinking about anybody else," Gaoa says. "The characters had to be funny and if we laughed, it was a pretty good indicator. We had a running battle with the network as far as scripts go but they let us run with crazy things we probably wouldn't have got away with elsewhere."

The demise of bro'Town will not leave the Naked Samoans resting on their laurels. They're hard at work on a hush-hush comedic collaboration with Eagle vs Shark's Taika Waititi and Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement. Gaoa knows this intriguing project might never have come to pass without the increased profile bro'Town gave him and his buddies. The Sione's Wedding star, doing double-duty with a role on Diplomatic Immunity, is making hay while the sun shines.

"We were lucky to find ourselves in a niche market, so to speak, which has kept us alive over the last few series. We're lucky it's animated - if people really saw us, they'd say, 'Those guys are too ugly. Get them off the TV!'."