New to view
After the Party
Robyn’s test of character
After playing Heather, the ordinary woman accidentally caught up in a massive drug smuggling operation in the terrific Far North, Robyn Malcolm arrives back in another local mini-series. And this one is personal – kind of. The actor created the role with co-writer Dianne Taylor. Penny is a free-spirited teacher at a Wellington boys’ high school, who finds that her ex-husband Phil (Scottish actor Peter Mullan) is back on the scene. They had split when she accused him of doing something terrible to a friend of their daughter Grace many years earlier.
What’s worse is that Phil has moved in with Grace, who has welcomed her father back, and that she is considering shifting to Scotland with him and her own young son.
The series follows Penny as she struggles with her family upheavals which leads her to some rash decisions involving her circle of friends and an attempt to investigate Phil’s life. It’s not a crime drama but there are shades of the first series of Broadchurch to its story, as well as some parallels to Mare of Easttown.
The early episodes previewed suggest Penny is tougher to like than the ones Malcolm is best known for. But thanks to Malcolm’s flinty performance and the script behind it, she’s a compelling, flawed, finely shaded and authentic character, and one who will be the driving force through the six episodes.
So, too, will be the performances of Mullan and Rurangi star Elz Carrad as Tom, a cousin to the family and a young policeman. Wellington’s Island Bay and its windswept surrounds provide a suitably stormy backdrop to the drama. Far North might be the more entertaining of Malcolm’s two shows this year, but After the Party will soon figure among Malcolm’s career-best performances. – Russell Baillie
Screening: TVNZ1, Sunday, 8.30pm
Streaming: TVNZ+
Reservation Dogs
Wrapping up the story on the rez
The crew of Native American teens made it to California at the conclusion of season two, but for this third (and apparently final) season they return to the reservation, a little older and maybe wiser. All is not well with Bear, who is distracted by William Knifeman, the world’s most annoying spirit guide, and he gets left behind on the journey. But everyone is growing and learning. Early reviews suggest this remarkable series, executive produced by Taika Waititi, will go out on a creative high.
Streaming: Disney +
RFDS
Mate, go for the doctor
A second season of the adventures and dramas of the doctors, nurses, pilots, and support staff of Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service. The core cast – including Logies fan favourite Nurse Pete Emerson (Steve Peacocke) – have a few new friends, including Emma Harvie (Colin from Accounts) as Chaya, a charismatic mental health nurse.
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.45pm, Thursdays
Streaming: TVNZ+
Evacuation
Final flight
The truth behind the perilous British campaign to evacuate Kabul in 2021 – Britain’s biggest airlift since World War II – is told in this three-part documentary via interviews with those who were there. The doco united reviewers across the usual party lines when it aired on Channel 4 in July. The Daily Mail called it an “unmissable account” and the New Statesman predicted it would “win all the prizes”. There have been other documentaries about the evacuation of Kabul, observed the Irish Independent, “yet none so emotionally intimate, intense and bone-raw as this”.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Shepherdess
Women of the land
A local documentary series about women living and working on the land which, in each hour-long episode, features three in the same rural location. In episode one it’s off to the Tokanui district in the Catlins to spend time with a diverse trio of women involved in sheep farming and shearing. Future episodes largely leave the shearing shed behind – the series takes its title from the rural women’s magazine Shepherdess. The episodes we’ve seen suggest it is a slightly grittier Country Calendar – a show that’s on just before it on Sunday nights.
Screening: Sky Open, 7.30pm, Sundays
World on Fire
WWII, part 2
Because of the pandemic, there has been a four-year gap since the debut season of this BBC World War II drama and the second. The slightly soapy first series started in the war’s opening months on a mission to give a social history lesson about the conflict via interwoven lives of a deliberately diverse bunch of people. The second starts near the end of the Battle of Britain but with its UK characters still facing the Blitz. The other storylines in the six episodes are stretching to North Africa, where the English troops who survived Dunkirk in season one are now facing the Siege of Tobruk, poor chaps. The production delays have meant Helen Hunt and her first season character, an American correspondent in Berlin, hasn’t returned, nor has Sean Bean’s WWI veteran and pacifist. But they may have plenty of time to appear further on – given that this second series picks up in October 1940 and runs until May 1941. At this rate there will be six or seven more seasons needed to reach VJ Day.
Screening: Sundays from October 29, TVNZ 1, 9.30pm
Streaming: TVNZ+
My Kitchen Rules New Zealand
Impressing the Aussies
After five years in the wilderness, MKR NZ returns with Australian celebrity chefs Manu Feildel and Colin Fassnidge travelling New Zealand to meet our best home cooks and putting them to the test. There’s a $100,000 prize at stake. But it’s not just the humble homes – the series reportedly includes an encounter with hospitality heavyweights Sid Sahrawat, Thomas Hishon, Matt Lambert and Nick Honeyman at The French Kitchen, the private dining room at Sahrawat’s establishment in Auckland.
Screening: TVNZ 2, 7.30pm Monday October 30 and Tuesday October 31
Streaming: TVNZ+
Sanditon
Period drama of the week, No 1
The story Jane Austen never finished forges on into a third season and things are decidedly not tranquil at the seaside. Charlotte (Rose Williams) returns to Sanditon with her farming fiancé Ralph Starling (Cai Brigden) – but does she really have eyes for Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) her brooding, rich former employer, whose crush on her seems as big as his house? Meanwhile, Georgiana (Crystal Clarke) faces a very public court battle to save her inheritance and an old flame reignites for Lady Denham (Anne Reid).
Screening: BBC UKTV, 9.30pm, Monday October 30
Last Woman on the Planet
GBSB host on OE
Sara Pascoe, the ubiquitous English comedian and Great British Sewing Bee host, scored her possibly inevitable travelogue show in which she goes to out-of-the-way places and talks to the locals about jobs that might not be long for this world. It was called Last Woman on Earth in the UK, and we are starting with episodes from her 2020 first season, in which she’s off to Cuba, Finland and Georgia to try out jobs, including book reader to the cigar factory workers and Joseph Stalin Museum guide. Most episodes involve her in some sort of traditional dancing, a part of the show she isn’t enamoured with, she told the Listener earlier this year. “Michael Palin never had to dance. Joanna Lumley doesn’t have to dance. They just make us comedians dance.” If you need more Pascoe but less choreography, her debut novel Weirdo came out last month.
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.30pm, Monday October 30
Streaming: TVNZ+
The Gilded Age
Period drama of the week, No 2
Last year’s first season of Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes’ late-19th century New York period drama didn’t exactly set the period drama world on fire. Sure, the lavishly upholstered, frocked and hatted HBO show won a production design Emmy. But the writing and acting was so iffy, and the characters were so boring … we would lay odds that the end of the nine-episode first season had many fewer viewers than the first. And now, a second season begins with the rival old money-new money families living across East 61st St from each other still going at it, as are their respective servants. There’s some business in the early episodes involving the foundation of the Metropolitan Opera in 1883 by new money folk in competition to the old Academy of Music opera house and its closed circle of subscribers.
Screening: SoHo, 8.30pm, Tuesday October 31
Streaming: Neon from October 30
From earlier in the month
Grand Designs New Zealand
A spot of site seeing
The second season hosted by Auckland architect Tom Webster starts with a Perth-based couple building a holiday home on a sloping section above Ligar Bay near Golden Bay. Future episodes include another holiday home above Queenstown, a rammed-earth home near Geraldine, and houses on or near the sand dunes of Christchurch’s Brighton Beach and Mangawhai in Northland.
Screening: 7.30pm, Tuesdays
Streaming: TVNZ+
Hot Potato: The Story of the Wiggles
The famous four
Wigglepedia describes this as “the improbable story of the Wiggles, four friends who record a one-off album of children’s music in the early 90s and change the global music industry forever.” The site also notes that this is the first independently produced Wiggles documentary (2011′s Everybody Clap! Everybody Sing! was an in-house job). The lead production house is New Zealand’s own Augusto, which also made the Richie McCaw documentary Chasing Great. A crew followed the Wiggles troupe around for two years and there’s also a lot of archive footage from the foursome’s archives and sent in by fans.
Streaming: Prime Video
Raised by Refugees
New adventures of Young Pax
In the second season of Pax Assadi’s terrific coming of-age sitcom, his teenage self’s continuing attempts to reap social capital leads to the exciting prospect of vodka-fuelled fun – and also a difficult choice about whether to go with the adventure or stay fi rm in his religious beliefs and be “a good Baháʼí”. It’s all go in the family, as his parents begin to realise that raising a son in a western country has its challenges, his brother Mahan develops his own social life and Grandpa Masood has introduced an unexpected house guest.
Streaming: Neon
Screening: Sky Open, 8.30pm, Wednesdays
Tokyo Vice
On the yakuza beat
Inspired by Jake Adelstein’s 2009 memoir of the same name, which told the tales of the young American journalist’s descent into Tokyo’s criminal underbelly. The book is controversial – a report in The Hollywood Reporter cast doubt on the veracity of some of its stories – but that clearly matters less when it’s done as TV drama. Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver) plays Adelstein, who is hired by a prestigious newspaper to cover crime, then is taken under the wing of an experienced police detective (Ken Watanabe), before starting to wonder if there’s something else going on.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Bodies
Time-spanning whodunnit
Four London detectives in four different times – 1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053 – find a body on Longharvest Lane in the East End. Turns out it’s the same body every time. Gradually, they realise that not only are the incidents linked, but they seem to have something to do with Elias Mannix (Stephen Graham, Line of Duty), the leader of an authoritarian group called The Executive. Can they somehow work together across? Based on Si Spencer’s DC comic series and graphic novel of the same name, it also stars Amaka Okafor (Greatest Days), Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (The Great), Kyle Soller (Andor) and Shira Haas (Unorthodox).
Streaming: Netflix
Juice
Mad, colourful comedy
The pipeline from the Edinburgh Fringe to semi-autobiographical TV sitcom is still pumping. Mawaan Rizwan (Taskmaster, Two Weeks to Live) stars as Jamma, who is young, gay and very much wants to be the centre of attention. It’s based on Jamma’s mother Farida, played by his real mum Shahnaz Rizwan, who found herself with a Bollywood career after featuring in her son’s YouTube videos in 2012, and his brother Isaac is Rizwan’s real brother, actor Nabhaan Rizwan (Station Eleven). His patient boyfriend is played by Russell Tovey (Years and Years). The Guardian’s reviewer found it “patchy” but also “raucous and purely entertaining”.
Streaming: TVNZ+ (full season).
Malpractice
Physician, reveal thyself
This medical investigation thriller is set mostly in a Yorkshire hospital made for Britain’s ITV. And although it’s written by former doctor Grace Ofori Attah, so would seem to know what it’s talking about, it’s also the sort of suspension-of-disbelief-required internal investigation drama to be expected from its makers, World Productions, home of Line of Duty. While it’s set in a crumbling, post-Covid NHS, its main focus is seemingly dutiful emergency room doctor Lucinda Edwards (Niamh Algar), who comes under investigation after the death of an overdose patient she left in the care of a junior (Priyanka Patel) after a gunshot victim took priority. What might seem a case of scapegoat-itis soon turns into something more of a conspiracy thriller. Algar’s character is soon digging herself into a very big hole as the “Medical Investigation Unit”, under pressure from the overdose victim’s VIP father, gets on her case and finds anomalies.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Lessons in Chemistry
Apple TV lost no time adapting Bonnie Garmus’s 2022 debut novel about a neurodiverse scientist in the 1950s – it was greenlit in 2021 before the novel was released. Oscar winner Brie Larson (Room and Captain Marvel) plays Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant scientist who is gaslit and sidelined in her job at a research lab. It is the 1950s, after all, when such behaviour is normal, although Garmus tapped into her own experiences in a 21st-century advertising agency. When Elizabeth loses her job for the crime of pregnancy, she becomes the host of a chemistry-based cooking show that inspires women everywhere, not just in the kitchen.
Streaming: Apple TV+
Wolf
Not your standard TV thriller
Based on the 2014 book by Mo Hayder, the last in a series of seven novels featuring Detective Inspector Jack Caffery. (There won’t be any more – Clare Bastin, who wrote as Hayder, died in 2021.) In one branch of the narrative, DI Caffery (Ukweli Roach) returns to Wales, where he grew up, convinced that his former neighbour murdered his 10-year-old brother in the 1990s. In the other branch, a family in Monmouthshire is being terrorised by a psychopath. It’s not a standard crime thriller: The Guardian described it as “essentially two stories told in contrasting styles, smashed together in the manner of a mad scientist transplanting an ape’s mind into a human body and stepping back to see what happens”, and Den of Geek called it “unhinged”.
Both apparently meant it in a good way. But it sounds like a nasty piece of work, nevertheless.
Streaming: TVNZ+
The Fall of the House of Usher
When the victims are the villains
Screen-horror king Mike Flanagan has helmed contemporary adaptations of classic print stories before (notably, 2020′s The Haunting of Bly Manor was based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw), but for this retelling of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, he goes somewhere new, reimagining the Usher family as a stand-in for the Sacklers, the pharmaceutical dynasty that helped kindle America’s deadly opioid crisis. “Their evil is mythic, as is their downfall, a uniquely modern spin on a universal fable”, reads one of about two dozen reviews, nearly all of them laudatory, that have appeared in advance of the series’ Netflix launch.
Streaming: Netflix
Special Ops: Lioness
Jackie Ryan and her girl squad
Taylor Sheridan’s latest work is an action thriller starring Zoë Saldaña (Avatar) as Joe, an ex-US Marine CIA agent who leads an all-female squad of undercover agents whose mission is to make friends with the womenfolk in the lives of high-value terrorist targets to gather intelligence on them. It’s based on a real-life programme used by the US military to search local women in Afghanistan and Iraq. Saldaña’s Joe gets a new recruit Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), who is given the tricky job of befriending a suspect terrorist’s daughter. Meanwhile, the chain of command includes Nicole Kidman – or, judging by preview images, someone wearing a Mission: Impossible mask designed to look like Nicole Kidman – Morgan Freeman and Michael Kelly, who is back on CIA espionage thriller duties aft er his stint on Jack Ryan. Reviews have been so-so, but Sheridan has a way with genre stuff that has its own unsubtle gung-ho wide appeal.
Streaming: Amazon Prime
Everybody Loves Diamonds
... and everybody loves a good heist story. This Italian series takes a comedic approach to the 2003 Heist of Antwerp, said to be the largest diamond theft in the world. The writing team includes Stefano Bises, of Gomorrah and The New Pope fame and follows a team of small-time thieves as they fool top-level security systems.
Streaming: Prime Video
Beckham
The unbent truth
Three-part doco series on the football superstar which, according to our reviewer, is riveting even if you’ve followed his marriage to Spice Girl-turned-fashion-designer Victoria Beckham more than you’ve ever followed his playing career.
Streaming: Netflix
Mystery Road: Origin
Swan’s cygnet years
The third series of the sun-baked Australian outback crime drama is a prequel, heading back to 1999 and tracing the early days of Detective Jay Swan (Mark Coles Smith taking over from Aaron Pederson) as the Aboriginal officer who takes up a new post in the town where his estranged father Jack (Kelton Pell) lives. The six episodes will feature a bit of bother with the old man as well as Detective Swan dealing with a gang of neo-Nazis, a local cannabis farm, and his romantic entanglements with local woman Mary. This series was filmed in Western Australia, around Kalgoorlie, Boulder and Coolgardie.
Streaming: ThreeNow
Lupin
Une encore enfin
As one of the biggest hits in Netflix history, Lupin was always coming back – but it has taken a while. Season three, airing more than two years after the second season, finds Assane (Omar Sy) living, unhappily, far from the wife and child he farewelled for their own safety. He hatches a plan for them to leave Paris and join him – right after he carries out his most audacious theft yet. But things are never going to go that smoothly, are they? This season is bumped up from five to seven episodes.
Streaming: Netflix
Sneakerholics
Pumped up kicks
Hip-hop and American basketball have introduced many things into this country’s pop culture and street fashion.They have also brought with it, via the Nike Air Jordan (as seen in the recent Ben Affleck sportswear movie Air), and Kanye West’s “Yeezy” Adidas line, the desire for many to amass the perfect kicks collection – or make a business out of it. In Sneakerholics, Amon Tyson of Onehunga rap crew SWIDT turns television presenter and takes us on a seven-episode deep dive into the NZ sneakerhead underground.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Marvel’s Loki
Strange times at the TVA
It might have been 2 years since the action-packed finale of season 1, but the second season about Thor’s tricky brother picks up straight away on the story. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is back at the Time Variance Authority, but it’s not the same TVA. Apart from anything else, no one seems to know who he is. There are also some issues with him being involuntarily yanked through time. There’s a notable cast addition: the Oscar-winning Ke Huy Quan turns up as OB, the TVA’s in-house technology guy. After his time on Everything Everywhere All at Once, who better to deal with multiverse mishaps?
Streaming: Disney+
Our Flag Means Death
Rhys and Taika’s shipboard bromance rekindled
The second season of the HBO pirate rom-com returns with Rhys Darby’s aristocratic buccaneer Stede Bonnet and Taika Waititi’s Bluebeard still bruised after their high-seas love affair ran aground at the end of the first. The new series was shot in New Zealand rather than Los Angeles so there’s local faces joining Waititi, Darby and Dave Fane in the cast include Madeleine Sami, Erroll Shand, Anapela Polataivao, Maaka Pohatu (Far North, Wellington Paranormal), Rachel House and the ubiquitous Mark Mitchinson. Among the new imports are Minnie Driver as lady pirate Anne Bonny.
Streaming: Neon
Screening: Sky Open, Wednesdays, 8.30pm
Gen V
Splatter college drama
A spin-off of superhero black comedy The Boys centred on Godolkin University, the academy established by Vought International to nurture young supes – the first generation to actually know their powers have come from Compound V and not God – and help them develop their skills. But, as anyone who follows The Boys will know, Vought is evil and dark secrets begin to emerge. Jaz Sinclair and Chance Perdomo, who played together in the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, star, respectively, as a supe who can use her blood as a weapon and a metal-bender. But the character likely to attract the most commentary is Jordan Li, whose superpower is the ability to change gender at will. Li is played by both Derek Luh (Shining Vale) and London Thor (the US Shameless). Look out also for cameos from The Boys – this is effectively a bridge between seasons 3 and 4 of the original show – and blood. Lots of blood.
Streaming: Prime Video
This guide is updated weekly with new previews and reviews. See what was good in September that you might have missed here.
