We can only glimpse brilliance on NZ TV
At the moment I’m watching a series called Keeping Faith ,a great little drama about a Welsh lawyer who gets into some strife and disappears, leaving his wife to untangle his affairs.
The British Isles are adept at producing TV drama that grabs and holds your attention, despite a lack of car chases, nudity and special effects.
The secret is employing actors who can act and screenwriters who can write.
By contrast American TV drama often dispenses with scripts altogether. The formula is to draft the sexiest actors straight from drama school, shove them onto a glamorous set and let the cameras roll.
This trend, at least from my recollection, began with LA Law, and reached its apogee with Lucifer; the greatest crime against television ever produced.
Not all US drama is banal garbage unfit for human consumption. Series such as The Wire, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos show what they are capable of.
Yet for every show like The Good Wife there are two dozen Burn Notices.
This makes buying US drama a bit hit and miss, but there are a few simple rules. Nothing with Jennifer Garner, David Schwimmer or any actor who appeared in more than two episodes of Grey’s Anatomy for a start.
This might mean you miss out on Killing Eve, but the offal otherwise avoided makes this a good compromise.
Many US shows are ramshackle ensembles of absurdly young female detectives and bewilderingly handsome villains swapping coffee, bad lines and each other because the producers spend their entire budget on magnificent sets and forget to pay the guy who writes the dialogue.
Their former colonial overlords, by contrast, don’t have billion-dollar budgets. They have to make do with the facades of the former courthouse in Swansea and, if the weather gods are smiling, a sand-less beach.
Yet British drama is consistently more watchable for the simple reason that they employ
actors, not models, and scriptwriters with literacy skills and life experience.
Down here we’ve developed our own distinctive style of acting that has its genesis in the tawdry series Gloss. This was the forerunner for Shortland Street, a programme that for nearly three decades has set the standard for local acting.
A willing suspension of disbelief is required when watching fiction unfold before us and for this to work, those doing the acting need to, well, act. Our actors don’t do that. They impersonate.
Watching Michael Galvin playing Dr Chris Warner you are never invited to believe that it is a real doctor before you. Galvin is always there, mimicking the doctor, but not becoming him.
This is the New Zealand style of acting and viewers are required to endure rather than enjoy the production.
Yet that is what we produce. By the metric tonne. Outrageous Fortune, Nothing Trivial, The Almighty
Johnsons, The Blue Rose, Go Girls are a mere fraction of the programmes that have all been tainted by the Shortland Street curse of mimicry rather than acting.
Yet, our actors can act. Watching former Shortland journeyman Marton Csokas inhabit a troubled crime writer in Dark Crimes leaves the viewer in no doubt that his cringeworthy performances as Dr Dodds were what was demanded of him rather than a reflection of his talents.
Csokas’ Shortland Street stablemate Craig Parker brilliantly transformed himself into an elf in The Lord of the Rings, yet as Guy Warner he was never able to rise above a stale imitation of the character he was portraying.
Perhaps we are getting, as audiences, what we desire, but I do not think this is true.
It seems more probable that a local industry commissioned primarily by state funding has produced several generations of great talent inhibited by the low standards that conservative executives demand of them.
Yet, there are flashes of brilliance. Once Were Warriors and The Piano provide glimpses of the real potential that lies on our shores. Sadly, glimpses are all we get and these performances never make it to the small screen.
There seems no reason why we could not produce drama with the believability of Foyles War, The Fall or Call the Midwife.
Shows based on little more than powerful scripts and credible acting. Instead we are stuck with unwatchable dishwater like Filthy Rich and Fresh Eggs.
New Zealand television must compete with the world’s best productions for our attention; which might make you wonder why anyone would watch something as awful as Westside.
Until you remember that, despite the $6m-aseason in state funding, almost no-one did.