WORTH WATCHING
One Lane Bridge TVNZ 1, 8:30pm Monday
When you think "serious New Zealand TV drama", what’s the one image that immediately comes to mind? It’s Joel Tobeck as a detective standing under a bridge, isn’t it. What — he’s a good actor! In One Lane Bridge his detective character is investigating the death of a local farmer whose body is found underneath the titular Queenstown bridge. So far, so generic but wait! Things take a hell of a turn when his young Cook Island Māori detective partner (Dominic Ona-Ariki) unlocks the power of matakite — basically a kind of supernatural second sight thing. This suddenly got a lot cooler.
Bradley Walsh and Son: Breaking Dad TVNZ 1, 7:30pm Monday
Remember when you were a kid, how weird it was to spot your teacher anywhere that wasn’t school? That’s kind of how it feels seeing Bradley Walsh anywhere that isn’t The Chase studio. In Breaking Dad he’s broken out and hit the road with his 20-yearold son, Barney — who looks as if he belongs on Love Island — for a road trip across the United States. In a setup suspiciously similar to Jack
Whitehall’s Travels With My Father (Netflix), dad’s wishes for a sedate, peaceful holiday are frequently scuppered by the thrill-seeking, adventure-crazed boy.
Too Hot to Handle Netflix
Just when you thought you’d watched every single dumb addictive reality series on Netflix and could finally get on with your life — surprise! Too Hot To Handle is the 40 Days and 40 Nights of reality shows, in which 10 hot and horny young singletons are thrown together in a tropical paradise with the cruel twist being that they can’t do any sexy bits on each other, or, in today’s terms, have to practice social distancing. Every time they don’t, a bit more cash gets sluiced off the $100,000 grand prize for the last one standing, all in the naive hope that by not touching they’ll be forced to develop real and lasting emotional connections.
MOVIE OF THE WEEK LA Originals Netflix
If you listened to any popular hip-hop in the 90s and 00s, and certainly if you spent hours watching hip-hop videos every weekend back in the days New
Zealand had multiple music channels, you’ll have felt the cultural influence of Mark “Mister Cartoon” Machado and Estevan Oriol, whether you know it or not. One’s a tattoo artist to the stars, the other a road manager who photographed everybody who was anybody, and LA Originals is a documentary paying tribute to their combined impact, featuring testimonies from Snoop, Kobe (RIP), Eminem and heaps more.
FROM THE VAULT Friday (1995) Netflix
To some, Friday is nothing short of a canonical film text, while many others have never heard of it. Is the divide here along racial lines, or generational, or is it simply a stoner thing? Could be a bit of all three. All I can say for sure is that if you have ever uttered the phrase “Bye Felicia” without knowing from whence it came, you are morally obligated to watch this movie ASAP.
PODCAST OF THE WEEK Lifers with Ed Gamble
You know British comedian Ed Gamble, he’s the one off Taskmaster, the last series, the one with Rose Matafeo. Nice lad, very clean cut. Who could have known he was a total freak for heavy metal?
Well, now we all know because he’s done a podcast about it. Lifers with Ed Gamble is an eight-episode series made for Spotify, in which he goes about visiting and interviewing people who have literally dedicated their lives to the loud art of heavymetal music.
We’re not talking metal millionaires like Ozzy Osborne or James Hetfield here, we’re talking people like Brian Tatler, lead guitarist of seminal British metal band Diamond Head, or Jodie and Julie Turner, sisters who formed the all-girl metal band Rock Goddess when they were aged 13 and 9.
These are people who have sacrificed a lot of quite important things — financial stability, for example — to pursue their one true love of throwing up the devil horns and rocking out. The chats are honest, earnest, funny and sometimes quite profound — just two (or three) people who don’t always have a lot in common apart from their shared love of metal. You don’t also have to love metal to appreciate the results.