WORTH WATCHING
Young Rock Prime, 7.30pm Tuesday
Despite common logic and plenty of stories to the contrary, about how he actually grew up in New Zealand and all that, it’s impossible to envision Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a child. The imagination goes back as far as that photo of him in the black turtleneck with the gold chain, and that’s where it stops. But maybe that’ll change once we get to see Young Rock, the sitcom based on his early years as a 10-year-old growing up in Hawaii, a high school student in Pennsylvania and a college football star in Florida. Okay, so no New Zealand scenes, but there are a handful of local actors popping up throughout the series.
Creamerie
TVNZ OnDemand, from Monday
Think of a world where all the men have died of a
mysterious plague, leaving all the women to get on with it — is that a utopian or dystopian image? That’s what’s happened in new local series Creamerie, a darkly funny take on
The Handmaid’s Tale set on a New Zealand dairy farm. It’s eight years since the last man coughed up his last lungful of blood, and things aren’t quite as idyllic as any of the women working the land (Ally Xue, Perlina Lau and JJ Fong from Flat 3 and Friday Night Bites) might have hoped. Then a mystery man (Jay Ryan from Go Girls) shows up, and things get even stranger.
Snabba Cash Netflix
In Swedish, “snabba” means “fast”, which must have made Mr Loverman a novelty hit. Snabba Cash started life as a popular crime novel by Jens Lapidus, first published in 2006. There was a film adaptation in 2010, released in Englishspeaking territories as Easy Money, and now we’re back with a series-length remake written for the screen by the book’s original author. It’s a tense, high-stakes drama about a tech entrepreneur looking for “snabba cash” to fund her start-up and the criminal underworld she gets drawn deeper and deeper into in her efforts to find it. If you love your Nordic noir but sometimes wish it moved at a more frenetic pace, this is the answer.