Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
MOVIE OF THE WEEK TVNZ 2, 7pm Sunday
Impossible to take Eddie Redmayne quite so seriously after that bit in where Rob Brydon points out his name sounds like that of a storybook horse, but here we are, and here he is, in the answer to the question: what are we supposed to watch now all the Harry Potter movies have been made? JK Rowling’s is a prequel of sorts — Redmayne’s character Newt Scamander is the future author of the classic Hogwarts textbook from which this film takes its name.
The Trip To Spain Fantastic Beasts FROM THE VAULT Harry Potter 1-8 (2001)
If the mere mention of a certain boy wizard’s name sends you spiralling back into an unbreakable cycle of watching
Flack TVNZ On Demand, from Friday
We are in the middle of a mini golden age of media industry-based TV dramas. There’s the post-Sex millennial mag drama on Neon, post-hacking scandals British newspaper drama over on Lightbox — both gloriously entertaining fantasies bearing only the faintest resemblance to reality. Now to complete the trio
says you need at least three for a "mini golden age") there’s coming this week to TVNZ On Demand.
The British series is set in the darkest, most amoral depths of the public relations machine. Our focal point is publicist Robyn (Anna Paquin), an expat American whose ambiguous accent means you could also pretend she’s from New Zealand if it makes you feel more patriotic. Robyn is basically a highfunctioning human train wreck, capable of applying a full beauty regime on the
City Type (The Hyperbolic Journalist’s Manual
the entire series of movies all over again, then you probably already know they’ve recently been added to the Netflix library. They’ve even got a convenient number in the corner of each thumbnail so you don’t have to try to remember whether
came before or after as you churn through them one after the other for the 30th time.
Order of the Phoenix Prisoner of Azkaban and the The Bold Press Flack, PODCAST OF THE WEEK The Drop Out
Elizabeth Holmes has a hell of a story — though "investigative podcast series" probably isn’t the format in which she envisaged it being told. Holmes was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a health startup which claimed to have revolutionised the blood test. In 2015 the company was valued at over $9 Tube before work and mostly able to confine her existential crises to the four seconds she has alone in the lift each morning.
But though her own life is a complete shambles she’s highly skilled at sorting out the dilemmas of her rich and famous clients. A sex-addict celebrity chef with a wholesome family image to protect, a teenage pop star with a wholesome family image she’s desperate to shed — each episode brings a new crisis to be managed via whatever borderline psychopathic means are necessary.
It could so easily be total rubbish. But even at its most outrageous, is still smart, self-aware, well written; the scene in the first episode where we’re introduced to Robyn’s absolutely terrifying boss is hands down one of the most entertaining bits of TV we’ll see all year. Importantly, it’s a show that never forgets it’s allowed to be funny — even if it is in the darkest, most cynical way. billion, and Holmes was being celebrated by magazine as the youngest (barely over 30) and richest selfmade female billionaire in the United States. Then came the reason the ABC have spent the past three years making a podcast about it all: the revelations of potential fraud, the misleading of investors, the millions of patients put at risk. By 2016 had revised Holmes’ net worth to $0. It wasn’t all on her shoulders, as the podcast explains; a lot of other people involved got it badly wrong along the way too, making the saga look like a badly organised housewarming by comparison. Exactly how it all happened will take more than a couple of episodes to unpack, but it’s worth it to finally get the whole story.
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