A new maturity in Kiwi film and TV writing
Ilive in central Wellington and I spend a lot of my working life around the less-lucrative fringes of the Wellington film industry. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I sometimes see the back of my own head, or a vehicle I’ve been driving, turn up on screen, in a show I’ve been working on.
Once you get away from the big budget shoots, a surprising amount of our film and TV industry still relies on improvising with what you’ve got on the day.
But even so, I was still kind of surprised, watching an early episode of new show Not Even, to see the house I live in and the van I drive suddenly turn up on screen.
I wasn’t working on the show. In fact, I barely knew it was being made.
Not Even is a drama and a comedy – just like real life – set around the lives and loves of a group of Mā ori and Pasifika students and yo-pros, all living, apparently, a few streets over from me.
As the show’s press kit unimprovably puts it: ‘‘Ma,
Heps, Pua, Liz and Taaps are 20-something Mā ori and Pasifika living in Wellington. Ma, Taaps and Heps have known each other since they were kids, Ma and
Pua are besties and Liz is Ma’s annoying cousin, trying to connect with whā nau after the death of her Dad. The group of friends crash through
Wellington city, warring first with their cultural identities and then with each other. Ma, a destructive hot mess, is on the decline, Pua, a Tongan trans woman, is career hungry, Heps struggles with his mental health, Taaps tries his best to support him and Liz is desperate to reclaim her taha Mā ori.’’
On the screen, that translates to a funny, smart and credible portrait of a bunch of hugely likeable people, who all feel to me to have been written from the inside, looking out.
Not Even, like Rā rangi and a handful of other recent, local shows, looks like the beginning of a new maturity and a new confidence in New Zealand film and TV writing. The characters in Not Even are quirky, human and occasionally exasperating. But they are not ‘‘types’’ or standard TV caricatures. They feel real – and probably based on people the show’s writer Dana Leaming (Ngā Puhi, Te Rarawa) knows well.
Once in a while, someone sends me a script to read and comment on – and I always tell them, if I see the word ‘‘typical’’ anywhere in it, don’t even bother. I reckon, as soon as anything in a script is ‘‘typical’’ then the writing is lazy and being produced to tick boxes, not to tell a real story.
In real life, no-one is really ‘‘typical’’ once we take the time to get to know them. And good script writing will always reflect that.
In Not Even, everyone has their surprises and everyone confounds our expectations. That’s kind of the point.
Not Even brings to local writing some of the qualities I love in Netflix’s stunners The End of the F ...... World and Heartstopper.
It is heartfelt, never strikes a false note – no matter how unlikely it might seem – and is as honest as the day is long.
This show is a gem. Make some time for it.
The first six-part series of Not Even is now available to stream on Neon and SkyGo. New episodes also screen on Prime on Sundays at 8.30pm.