Chernobyl tops great year of television
the greatest ever. This five-part recreation of the days and months following the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, brought history to grim life. It was credible, insightful and stunningly well made. Some sequences stayed with me all year.
I was working at home with RNZ National when the news began to flow out of Christchurch. I spent the afternoon toggling between RNZ, TV One and TV3, horrified at the events, but with immense appreciation and respect for the professionalism and restraint our media showed. TV One’s Simon Dallow, in particular, was extraordinary.
I was late to the party with this show, but I’m glad I made it. Peaky Blinders is my new Deadwood and The Sopranos. It’s brutal, funny, intense and credibly human. And, unlike a lot of crime and gangster genre shows, the women are front and centre, driving the narrative just as often as the men. Series 5 dropped in October.
A local gem. The Casketeers is a documentary series set in the Tipene wha¯ nau’s Auckland funeral home. This is a warm, wry and hugehearted show, like nothing else in the world. If you haven’t watched it yet, try it. I reckon it’ll quickly become your favourite free-to-air show.
The full four hours (TVNZ1 showed a three-hour edit) was an ordeal. But, after it, there was no doubt we had been told the true story of a sexual predator. Yet the film was never unsympathetic to Jackson, painting a disturbing picture of his own hideously dysfunctional childhood.
The old haunted-house-as-metaphor-for-childhoodtrauma genre never gets old. But seldom is it as compelling as this loose adaptation of a 1959 novel of the same name. A second series is set to debut in 2020. That makes me happy.
Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish as two 30-something bird women living in an apartment in New York? With Reggie Watts, Awkwafina and Isabella Rossellini in support? Just take my money. It is a single-season cult.
Also well worth having a look at: Netflix’s The End of F...ing World, TVNZ’s The Great Kiwi Bake Off and Netflix’s Schitt’s Creek.