It's official: television originality got thrown out with the funding bathwater.
In their quest to make TV irrelevant and their own jobs redundant, TV executives have proven that original thought has no place in the heads of modern programmers.
Instead, they have opted to buy franchise rights from the United States, Britain and Australia and screen banal overseas reality shows with Kiwi accents.
The latest is The Great Kiwi Bake Off in which New Zealand home bakers demonstrate their ineptitude in front of barely qualified celebrity judges.
Before that — and some are still running — we "enjoyed" franchise fee-paying rip-offs like New Zealand's Got Talent, The Block NZ, Grand Designs New Zealand, Gogglebox NZ, The Bachelor NZ, My Kitchen Rules NZ, Dancing With the Stars, Survivor NZ, Project Runway NZ, Celebrity Treasure Island, First Dates NZ and so much more lowbrow drivel from the imagination of overseas writers.
To make it worse, if the New Zealand version is still in production or in recess, TV still proudly screens its overseas original (or the Australian version), showing how it should be done, before gamely showing its diluted, low-budget Kiwi copy. It's embarrassing to compare.
