Four Bygone Kiwi Shows In Need Of A Revival

While we don’t exactly have the gaudy budgets of many of our international contemporaries, every now and again, a great Kiwi show comes along that is a genuine gem. Unfortunately, like shooting stars, shows like this seem destined not to be around in our lives for long enough, and they eventually meet their end as interest wanes or the people involved move onto other things. Still, that doesn’t stop us mourning their absence and pining for their return. Here’s four Kiwi shows we’d love to see back on our airwaves one day.  

bro’Town

It might struggle to stay on the air in the hypersensitive climate of 2021 (heck, it barely survived the pitchforks to see a second season back in ‘05) but the iconic Kiwi comedy bro’Town was the kind of TV making you just don’t see anymore on New Zealand television and it is severely missed. Helmed by the famed Polynesian entertainment crew, the Naked Samoans, bro’Town was a truly authentic comedy that, at the risk of sounding cliché, wasn’t interested in curtailing to politically correct guidelines of representation. However, it’s worth noting that what made bro’Town succeed where so many ‘edgy’ comedies fail was because it wasn’t trying to be controversial for the sake of it and at its core it was a good hearted (and genuinely funny) reflection of a time and culture it always respected, not matter how much fun it poked at it. The creators of bro’Town have all gone off and done great things in the 12 years since its final episode, and rumours of a feature length bro’Town film have floated around since 2018, but if the team was given the same room to flirt with the boundaries of socially acceptable comedy that they were in the mid 00’s, it would no doubt still be a classic. 

 

The Rich List

This is a massive personal favourite. The Jason Gunn-hosted The Rich List was a brilliantly clever and creative twist on your classic quiz show. It was essentially a game of ‘chicken’ between two teams; a category would be named and the two teams would wager how many answers in that category they think they could come up with. Eventually, one team cries ‘uncle’ and challenges the other team to back up their talk and name the number of answers they wagered. If they can, they win the round. If they can’t, the other team wins. Admittedly, my personal affinity for this one might be down to the fact we played it regularly in primary school and my team once named 35 cartoon shows for the win (our teacher was stunned, impressed and probably a bit concerned all at once), but the format created an awesome strategic wrinkle to a genre which can get a bit same-y.  

Pulp Sport

Another show that might have been only able to exist as a product of its time, Ben Boyce and Jamie Linehan’s often genius sketch-comedy Pulp Sport was one of New Zealand’s true cult-classic comedy series and nothing of its ilk has been able to replicate it since. Perfectly blending ridiculous, over-the-top antics with clever cultural satire, Pulp Sport was a rare case of a ‘prank’ show that took aim at just about everyone without resorting to cheap shots or being mean-spirited. Was it incredibly juvenile and immature? Often, yes, absolutely, but honestly, we all need a bit of ridiculous juvenile humour in our lives sometimes. The show made such stars of its two leads that the two launched a satirical political party, ran in the 2008 general election, and actually pulled over 13,000 votes. The show came to a close in 2009 and the era of cheap YouTube pranksters has essentially filled the void that Bill & Ben left behind, although most are far less creative than the boys who had Kiwi on their couch in stitches throughout the mid 00’s. 

 

The G.C.

OK, wait, I know what you’re thinking, but here me out. I’m calling this one a reclamation project. The GC was not a good television show, by almost any metric. It was a poor attempt to capitalise on the popularity of far superior raunchy faux-celebrity reality lifestyle shows like the U.S.’s Jersey Shore and the U.K.’s Geordie Shore. However, the problem with The GC wasn’t the concept, it was the execution; the show was absolutely flaccid, incredibly over-produced and, probably most egregiously, lacking a single screen presence with any semblance of charisma. Despite what stick-in-the-mud snobs might have you think, the maintained popularity in overseas ‘trashy’ reality television shows, such as Love Island UK, suggests that there’s absolutely a market for a show like this still in 2021. But what our versions of these shows never seem to understand is that while ‘pretty’ people bring eyeballs to episode one, it’s real characters that keep people tuning in night after night. Find some gems in a cast and a show like The GC would be an absolute hit.