Monsters mess with New Zealand in the series ‘Wellington Paranormal’
Americans will soon learn there are more creatures in New Zealand than just hobbits.
Thanks to the expanding cinematic universe of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, the list now includes vampires, werewolves, zombies, disco-era ghosts and projectile-vomiting demons.
The “Flight of the Conchords” star Clement and the “Thor: Ragnarok” director Waititi co-wrote, co-directed and costarred in the 2014 film about a group of New Zealand vampire housemates, “What We Do in the Shadows,” and co-created the U.S. TV series of the same name on FX.
Now, they’re bringing their New Zealand TV show, “Wellington Paranormal,” to the U.S. with a premiere on The CW on Sunday.
A comic mockumentary with echoes of “Cops” and “The X Files,” “Wellington Paranormal” follows a pair of uniformed police officers, played by Mike Minogue and Karen O’Leary, in the title city as they investigate monstrous happenings with bureaucratic banality.
“The way that the characters react to things are quite New Zealand, the way that people either are understated or they don’t know what to do,” Clement said with a laugh in an interview with The Associated Press via Zoom from Wellington.
The show is a spinoff of the “What We Do in the Shadows” film, with Minogue and O’Leary reprising their roles.
But unlike the New York-set “Shadows” TV series, which was made for an American audience, U.S. viewers will see the same episodes that first aired in 2018 in New Zealand, where the show’s third season just aired and the fourth is in production.
Clement isn’t worried about the jokes getting lost between hemispheres.
“We try to cram it with jokes so that you won’t really notice if you don’t get a specific cultural reference,” he said.
A more significant difference may be the countries’ police cultures, and the prevailing attitudes around them.