Brilliant comedy emerges from Shadows

At last. After decades of short-lived, disappointing and downright diabolical sitcoms such as Willy Nilly, Diplomatic Immunity and Melody Rules, finally we have one we can be proud of and laugh with. Wellington Paranormal (8.30pm, Wednesday, TVNZ2) is a Kiwi deadpan comedy to rival Australia’s The Games or Frontline, a spot-on police procedural spoof, New Zealand’s answer to The X-Files and the Police Ten 7 parody the world has been craving.

Spun off from Taika Waititi’s and Jemaine Clement’s bigscreen 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, this follows the misadventures of coppers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O’Leary) as they battle the city’s forces of darkness.

There’s Hataitai’s unholy realm, Kilbirnie Satanism and, in the hilarious opening episode, a potential Hellmouth based around a Cuba Mall landmark.

After encountering a young woman whose clear unwellness seems more a case of demonic possession than the usual alcopop poisoning, the pair are taken aside by Sergeant Ruawai Maaka (Maaka Pohatu) and invited into the station’s secret room – a place that houses the headquarters of the Wellington Paranormal Division.

Establishing a link to similar cases in the 1950s and 80s, this self-confessed antipodean Mulder and Scully (‘‘She’s analytical and got brains and I’ve got brown hair,’’ reasons Minogue) attempts to stop the demon before the central city becomes home to buckets of blood and rivers of fire.

But as they hunt down the fiend as it constantly changes hosts (‘‘We’re in pursuit of a highly acrobatic housewife,’’ they report in at one point), the pair find themselves up against a potentially even greater foe – Wellington’s less-than-reliable mobile network.

Sharply written, brilliantly observed and deliberately made to look cheap, the New Zealand Documentary Board (aka Waititi’s and Clement’s Shadows company) has delivered a winning formula.

Minogue ( Hunt for the Wilderpeople) and O’Leary ( The Breaker Upperers) prove to be masters of deadpan delivery (‘‘If we identify a UFO, does that mean it’s an FO?’’) and physical comedy, while the situations are saleably universal and magnificently Kiwi. As Minogue so brilliantly puts it, ‘‘I don’t care if you are from another planet – you come to New Zealand, you respect our rules’’.

Made by people who clearly love their sci-fi and horror movies and know how to create great comedy, Wellington Paranormal almost makes up for TVNZ’s famous gaffe in the noughties of failing to commission a project from New Zealand’s ‘‘fourth-most popular folk-parody duo’’.

What’s certain, though, is that it lives up to the New Zealand Police’s one-time recruitment campaign of ‘‘better work stories’’. - James Croot