Get ready for an extra night of Shortland Street. Photo / Supplied
Get ready for an extra night of Shortland Street. Photo / Supplied
Shortland Street's upcoming move to screen six nights a week will mark a world first for the Kiwi soap.
New Zealand's longest-running drama is set to begin its Sunday season on September 9.
It will kick off with a one-hour episode and then half-hour episodes every Sunday to Friday until the end of the year.
This makes it the first serial drama in the world to air six nights a week.
This, combined with the fact that Shortland Street has the fastest turnaround in the world, is a major achievement. They shoot an average of one minute of screen time every 20 minutes - in comparison, fellow hospital drama Mercy Peak would take a full 10-hour day to shoot seven minutes.
So while six episodes sound like a lot more Shorty for your buck, the show's producer and long-time writer Maxine Fleming says the workload - and the pace - is nothing new.
The show always adds an extra half-hour a week during its winter season, though it usually airs back to back with another episode to create the season's one-hour Mondays.
"So we're not making any more episodes like some people might think, it's just that the 250 episodes we make in a year are being screened in a different way," she says.
"I believe we will be the first to [air six nights a week], so it'll be interesting to see how that goes."
She says TVNZ will no doubt be monitoring the ratings to see how the Sunday episodes go down with fans and "if it does well they might look at how they might screen it down the track".
She couldn't elaborate on what that might mean, but did say the six-nightly episodes likely wouldn't be ongoing after the Sunday season.
There are new beginnings for Shortland Street, in more ways than one! Photo / Supplied
"We'd have to make a hell of a lot more episodes than we currently do, which would be pretty much impossible," she says.
At any rate, she reckons fans of the show will be "more than happy" to have it while it lasts and promises "we've kicked off with a really good episode".
The cast and crew of Shortland Street are working to cram three weeks' worth of filming into two, as they sometimes do to meet the demand of the extra episodes, and get to their 250-episode target.
"We've just launched into that now, so that's three weeks of incredibly busy days. But basically, we're making an extra week's episodes so that we can all have a much-deserved break at Christmas," she explains.
"It's full on, but you know, we're doing it. It's such an incredible machine, Shortland Street. When it kicks in, it's so amazing to see how the cast, crew and writers manage to all pull together to produce a phenomenal amount of work."
While they're "excited" about the prospect of broadcasting into Kiwi lounges six days a week, Fleming says, until then, "we'll just keep trying to make the best show that we can in the time available".
"It'll just be great to see how it goes down on Sunday nights and I think it might do really well - but only time will tell."
