Spy: Keisha Castle-Hughes drama among new TV shows given green light

Keisha Castle-Hughes, who stars in FBI: Most Wanted, is set to appear in a new drama for TV. Photo / Getty Images

A new Keisha Castle-Hughes drama is among the latest new shows to receive funding from NZ On Air.

The government funding organisation has given the green light to five shows, with up to nearly $13 million worth of grants.

Three of the shows are new and two - The Gone and Double Parked - will have a second season. Both have nominations in this year’s New Zealand Television Awards.

Madeleine Sami and Antonia Prebble star in Double Parked. Photo / Matt Klitscher.

Season two of Three’s comedy Double Parked stars Antonia Prebble and Madeleine Sami and sees their characters, Steph and Nat, as new mums struggling to save their relationship while looking after their newborns.

One of the stand-out local drama hits of this year – TVNZ 1′s crime drama The Gone - has taken the bulk of the funding with up to $4.5 million.

The New Zealand/Ireland co-production starring Acushla-Tara Kupe and Irish actors Richard Flood and Michelle Fairley became the highest-reaching local new drama series on TVNZ+ so far this year.

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Among the new shows is Sky Open’s Son, starring Castle-Hughes, who moved back to NZ from New York earlier this year. The series is set in rural Canterbury amid dystopian tumult caused by perpetual daylight as Earth’s gravitational fields go haywire. The story centres on a mother’s journey to find her son, and the characters she meets along the way.

Three will have new drama Year Of The Fox, about Mere who has returned to her tribal land to continue her father’s mission of saving the whenua. Her life is complicated by a hot farmer neighbour and a dirtbag ex who inhabits her head.

Lastly, TVNZ 2 have new comedy Warren’s Vortex from the writing team behind Wellington Paranormal. The series is about Lower Hutt dad, Warren, who has a hidden vortex in his garden shed that leads to parallel realities where life in New Zealand is all a bit twisted.