On the money
TV review with Duncan Greive
Like many people under the age of 40 — and a large portion of those older — linear television has almost entirely given way to on demand in my viewing habits. Linear, scheduled television can feel quaint, a prior form of human behaviour still lingering while a superior product works its way through generations, until the tipping point arrives when it ceases to be economic to broadcast it anymore.
Still, I found myself exhausted in front of the television on Monday night and decided to head back through the mists of time and turn on the venerable old warhorse TVNZ1 and watch a pair of shows that appear emblematic of the vanishing world linear represents. Fair Go and Mind over Money — the new Nigel Latta docu- series — are some of the last remaining vestiges of the public service ideal of broadcasting, each with a kind of edu- tainment quality to them. Fair
Go in its forever quest to inform its viewers of the Consumer Guarantees Act, while Latta’s new series attempts to teach financial literacy by way of some pop economics and psychology. Perhaps surprisingly, both were fun and fresh, as well as having sensibilities deeply rooted in our national psyche.
Debuting 40 years ago, Fair Go is a hall of famer, trading on two key national traits: a desire of justice to be status blind, and a kind of proud cheapskatery. It was a perfect lead- in to Mind over
Money, the latest in Nigel Latta’s endless parade of factual series, though with a modern twist. That is, despite its clear public interest formulation — getting people to be less dumb with their money — it was funded not by NZ on Air, but by Kiwibank.
Latta has done a lot of this stuff: shows he’s fronted have received over $ 7m in NZ on Air funding over the last decade. But we’ve got a huge amount for it: 13 seasons or so of mostly good- to
great TV. Mind over Money essentially functions as a simplified version of the likes of Freakonomics, Nudge and Thinking Fast and Slow, a range of popular non- fiction books of the past few years. Sometimes it felt a little too basic, but more often it was breezy and amiable .
It thus performed a public service function on a channel which is often ( and rightly) derided for having abandoned that ethos, while being funded in a very modern way. And both shows, which screen in primetime on TVNZ1, show that while linear television might be on the way out, it’s certainly not dead yet.