A version of this review ran in The Spinoff’s weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.
It’s not true that there is a house style to New Zealand television drama, but there are some threads that show up quite often. There’s the fusion of high stakes with comic elements, well-executed in previous Robyn Malcolm projects like Outrageous Fortune and Far North from earlier this year. This is likely both a natural outflow of the material and an attempt at going broad, understandable in a small market like ours. Less forgivable is a tendency toward caricature, roles reduced to heroes and villains – a pernicious issue that infects plotting and scripts and flows out into performances that leave our fine actors grasping like the soap stars they once were.
