TV Preview: Not so hot on the set

Hot Set's Ben Mankiewicz, Curt Beech, Lilly Kilvert and Barry Robison.

Series end and the silliness starts, finds Nick Grant

The advent of summer is more reliably heralded by a slew of free-to-air TV series calling it quits for the year than it is by the arrival of sunny weather. And sure enough, among those shows wrapping up this week are Blue Bloods, Both Worlds, Downton Abbey, NZ's Got Talent, Piha Rescue, Scandal, Shortland Street and Survive Aotearoa.

The surest sign it's the start of television's silly season, though, is that Four's Hot Set is the most promising new series on the schedule. (True, on Tuesday, One does launch Tricked, featuring some young bloke's "irreverent brand of undercover magic", but frankly I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than be fooled into watching yet another on-screen sorcerer. I mean, smoke and mirrors are one thing but add editing and other telly techniques to the mix and the whole exercise is rendered ridiculously redundant).

Hot Set is the short-lived sister series to Face Off, the US reality game show in which special effects makeup artists demonstrate their craft and compete against each other in creating fantastical and/or horrific creatures and characters.

Hot Set's, ahem, set-up is exactly the same as Face Off's, except instead of makeup artists it involves production designers, who are essentially the people responsible for the look of a movie or TV show.

To quote the over-excited intro, "in each episode of Hot Set, two production designers and their teams go head-to-head in a showdown to build a Hollywood set in just three days".

They're given a short brief to fulfil, based on what the show describes as "an iconic film inspiration" (translation: such movie cliches as "aliens, serial killers, androids, and secret agents"), and a budget of $15,000 with which to create a "hot set", showbiz-speak for one that's "perfectly dressed, locked and camera ready".

Then a short sequence is shot on the creations of each designer and the results are judged on creativity, technique and presentation by a panel of expert judges.

We're promised "imagination, perspiration, and exasperation" and lot of effort does go into trying to make things seem exciting - there's all the usual hectic editing and an aggressively percussive score. There's also as an unusual amount of name-dropping in the hope of conjuring up some secondhand sizzle (James Cameron, Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro have all filmed on the same stage as Hot Set, we're told and the host's grandfather wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane).

The programme-makers deserve marks for trying, I suppose, but in the end it's easy to see why Face Off is on to its sixth season and Hot Set was canned after one: it's a show that's literally about watching paint dry.

Meanwhile, in a rare example of a worthy repeat, this week Mihingarangi Forbes starts serving reheated highlights from Native Affairs. The first episode includes stories about a family displaying amazing grace and aroha in coping with their daughter's rare genetic disorder and a courageous woman's post-mastectomy breast reconstruction.

It's truly inspiring.

Native Affairs - Summer Series starts Monday, 8.30 pm, on Maori Television; Hot Set premieres Tuesday, 7.30pm, on Four.