Current affairs with pace plus humour and heart
The lights came on and, after two weeks of as-live rehearsals, they really were speaking to the nation. Even for the show’s guest, Rove McManus, who has spent most of his adult life on live television, it was a big moment.
He’s the master franchise owner and, therefore, as invested as anyone in the show’s success.
In truth, the first 10 minutes were a shambles, with Josh Thomson fumbling his first joke, and, in a botch that will go down in TV launch lore, the same serious story about a meth plague played twice, for an excruciatingly long time, before someone thought to throw back to the studio. For all that, the debut of The Project
NZ was a quiet landmark. In between the events described above came news headlines which didn’t assume you’d just sat through an hour of the 6pm bulletins.
It seems so simple, but it’s a massive change from the 7pm current affairs status quo. The assumption under which both
Seven Sharp and Story were operating, that the audience was sick of hard news and wanted something diverting, seems less likely to be true for younger people. Even the realtime consumption of news via social media throughout the day doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t want it packaged together and put into some sort of hierarchy.
So from the jump The Project NZ feels different: more pacy and urgent. But also more playful: “Kim Dotcom may be uploaded to the United States,” we were told, and the news was full of writing, not just information transferral.
Along with the format, the show will live and die on the chemistry
among its hosts. Jesse Mulligan is singing a redemption song after the extended torture on Seven Sharp, and the hours of live broadcasting he completes each week at Radio NZ helped him turn the potential disaster of the repeated meth story into a very good gag he turned back to later.
Josh Thomson, early fumble aside, showed what a singular comedic talent he is, sitting for an eternity on “as you know I’m a big fan of chicken”, allowing the moment to go from funny, to weird, and back again.
How his style will go on harder news remains to be seen, but he’s one of the most naturally gifted performers in the country, so deserves some rope to figure that out.
The show’s emotional core is Kanoa Lloyd, likely to be the breakout star The Project NZ needs.
She’s a generation down from Mulligan and Thomson, and even after a single episode you saw flashes of how differently she’ll work with news.
The boycott of Cadbury was one thing, but it was the casual way she revealed her own father’s struggle with addiction and use of counselling, in a manner that felt very natural rather than cynical, which impressed. Among the quick cuts and on-screen
The show’s emotional core is Kanoa Lloyd, likely to be the breakout star The Project NZ needs.
graphics it was a moment of reflection that cut right through.
Two more were provided by the well-cast guests. Ross Bell had only a minute or so, but used it to knife Mark Richardson, who had brainlessly riffed a solution to meth addiction on the AM Show earlier in the day: “Find the cook, take him out back and shoot him in the back of the head.”
The Duterte solution, which a certain kind of TV producer would no doubt applaud for being so provocative, but in this era, with the kind of leaders we have rising around the world, that joke just isn’t funny.
Michelle A’Court is, though. She was a sub in for Paula Bennett, and was interviewed about Pharmac’s mulling of a potential tampon subsidy. She delivered an electric couple of minutes, highlighted by what she’d buy with the money saved over a lifetime of not having to pay to have a period: “a 2010 Toyota Rav4” in bright red.
It was far from perfect. The clips of game-show contestants celebrating unconventionally and cooking-show fails felt like a very literal approximation of a social media feed.
And it was arguably too pacy: so much crammed in that there was no opportunity for the substantive conversation of which they’re no doubt capable.
Yet by its close there was a sense of relief; a current affairs show that contained the day’s events, delivered with energy, humour and, sometimes, emotion.