TELEVISION
Our Picks of the Week
EASTER SUNDAY APRIL 9 MARTIN CLUNES: ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC Clunes spans the Pacific
Screening: Living, 7.30pm
Actor Martin Clunes clearly has a thing about islands. This three-part travelogue follows his previous shows Islands of America, Islands of Britain and Islands of Australia. (Did no one tell him that New Zealand is an archipelago?) Here, he crosses the Pacific, learning its stories in a spirit of respect and, occasionally, bemusement. The series wrapped just as the pandemic was beginning, meaning that post-production was delayed – and it had to be explained in the script why no one is wearing a mask. But the delay had a stranger implication. Clunes visited the people of the village of Yakel in Vanuatu, who revere Prince Philip as a god. By the time it finally got to air, the prince had died. “What seemed amusing when he was alive is much more poignant now,” Clunes told the Daily Express. Elsewhere, it’s baguettes and coral wine in French Polynesia, the wildlife of the Galápagos and an encounter with the “third gender” in Tonga.
NOLLY Life at a Crossroads
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.30pm
Streaming: TVNZ+
This series about British soap star Noele “Nolly” Gordon was three episodes when it screened in the UK but TVNZ has it bundled into one feature-length block for this commercialfree Easter Sunday one-off. Helena Bonham Carter gives good hauteur as Gordon, the redhead matriarch of Crossroads. In her younger days, she was the first woman in the world to appear on colour television when inventor John Logie Baird needed a model with distinctive colouring as a test subject. See story page 60.
EASTER MONDAY APRIL 10
TRAVEL MAN: 96 HOURS IN RIO Nuts in Brazil
Screening: TVNZ 1, 7.00pm
If you’re missing the more laconic style of Richard Ayoade now that Joe Lycett has taken over as the Travel Man, this may be to your liking – his travel companion this time is that master of the hangdog expression, actor Stephen Mangan. Originally screened as a Christmas special in the UK – hence the extra length – it sees the pair eat, drink, ride bikes and actually not embarrass themselves in a pick-up game of footvolley, Brazil’s own blend of football and volleyball. And yes, of course they take the steep journey up to visit Christ the Redeemer, giving them the chance for the inevitable quip: Jesus, that’s a big statue.
LEGO MASTERS NZ If you build it …
Screening: TVNZ 2, 7.30pm, then Tuesday and Wednesday Lego Masters NZ returns as a three-nights-a-week television event. Host Dai Henwood and Mātanga Pereki BrickMaster Robin Sather are back, too. And, well, that’s all we know
right now. But as Sather said to the Listener last year: “When you see people on the screen, regular Kiwis, creating unbelievable things with just a lot of bricks and a lot of time, it’s inspiring. People look at that and think, ‘Well, we’ve got a bunch of Lego. Let’s see what we can build.’”
THE ROOKIE: FEDS New cop, new job
Screening: TVNZ 2, 9.30pm
Another run at The Rookie’s particular twist on the police procedural, this spin-off has found itself with a much warmer critical reception than the show it’s based on. Niecy Nash-Betts ( Claws, Reno 911)
plays Simone Clark, a former high-school guidance counsellor who achieves her lifelong dream and at 48 becomes the oldest recruit ever to join the FBI. Most reviewers have hung their praise on Nash-Betts’ presence in the lead role and Variety concluded: “As long as the producers keep relying on Nash-Betts’ deep well of charm and character, Feds has real potential.” That’s not to say that The Rookie itself isn’t still in there pitching. TVNZ 2 has also put together a marathon of the show’s best episodes, starting at 7.30pm on Saturday April 8 as a warm-up for the start of the show’s fifth season on April 10.
TUESDAY APRIL 11 VAN DER VALK Roster refreshed for season 3
Screening: Vibe, 8.30pm
Marc Warren is back as the no-nonsense Dutch cop Commissaris Van der Valk, as is Maimie McCoy, playing his boss Inspector Lucienne Hassell. But there’s a change-up in the cast: relative unknowns Django Chan-Reeves and Azan Ahmed join as police sergeants. It’s got a way to go to match the 20 years and 32 episodes of the original 70s show, but there are three more episodes here and Warren recently told Radio Times that he’ll play the character “as long as people want it”, so who knows?
WEDNESDAY APRIL 12 INSIDE THE HEIST Imperfect crimes
Screening: Three, 9.30pm
Commissioned by Discovery UK, this traverses some fairly well-worn cases. The 2015 Hatton Garden diamond robbery (episode 3), for instance, has already inspired three feature films, a radio play, a four-part ITV drama and a genuinely magnificent journalistic telling by Duncan Campbell for the Guardian. To freshen things up, the stories come with commentary from a cast of police officers, lawyers, criminologists and veteran bank robbers. The latter includes former US Marine Cain Dyer, who has become something of a media star in his own right.
CASA GRANDE Bosses and workers on the border
Screening: SoHo, 9.30pm
Streaming: Neon
The world of California’s rural migrant labourers and the landowners who employ them seems ripe for drama: it offers a reality full of grey areas, one at odds with both political narratives and, often, the law. Co-creator of the five-episode bilingual limited series, Ali Afshar, says he and his colleague Lauren Swickard “moulded Casa Grande as a Hispanic-influenced Yellowstone”, while the official log line characterises it as “an upstairs/downstairs story transposed from turn-of-thecentury English countryside to rural America”. The series director, Argentinian Gabriela Tagliavini, made the hit Mexican rom-com Ladies Night and is also a novelist and occasional CNN correspondent. The show was produced by ESX Entertainment, which usually makes cheesy Christmas films, and picked up by Amazon for its free US streaming service. Oddly enough, we get to see it three weeks before the Americans do.
THURSDAY APRIL 13 DJANGO A western from the Eurozone
Streaming: TVNZ+
The spaghetti western is back. This 10-part Italian-French production is pitched as a “reimagining” of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film. It’s something of a mash-up of that film, its sequel Django Strikes Again and Quentin Tarantino’s contemporary Django Unchained.
The cast, led by Matthias Schoenaerts ( Amsterdam), is notably international, befitting the show’s theme of inclusion. In this telling, Django, a man traumatised by the murder of his family eight years before, is searching for the daughter he believes may have survived. That search brings him to New Babylon, a haven for outcasts. He will become its defender.
7 DAYS News from NZ, jokes from all over
Screening: Three, 7.30pm
Streaming: ThreeNow
The borders are open and 7 Days is making the most of it. The new season will feature Brits Lloyd Langford and Sara Pascoe and Irishman Ed Byrne venturing into our news, along with a yet-to-be-announced line-up of Australians. Locals new and old are on board and Jeremy Corbett is still more or less running the show. ▮