The funniest, most original New Zealand cult comedy television show ever, Flight of the Conchords has ended its first series. Thankfully, a second will be made. Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, the comedy duo who are its Wellington stars and creators, are back home at the moment writing it.
There are some terrible ironies. One is that this excellent show is made not in New Zealand but in New York by HBO. The second is that it was not screened here by Television New Zealand or even TV3, but by the Sky-owned Prime. And third that it screened immediately after the Gibson Group’s truly awful Welcome to Paradise which may get, is the worrying word, even more public money from NZ On Air to make a second series.
Bret and Jemaine met as students at Wellington College and got together while studying film and drama at Vic. Their comedy is dry, understated wit as only a Wellington act could be. They are so good that Radio New Zealand did not make their radio series, the BBC did that in 2005, though Radio NZ aired it. They are so good that TVNZ ran for its life from either commissioning or screening their television series. Only Prime was courageous enough to step outside the look-alike template of reality television, crime shows and breathless pap that fill the schedules on every mainstream channel these days to air it. It says it all that its former slot last night was occupied by more soft porn about Nicky Watson.
For those who have not seen the show (which should be available on DVD before long), it has Bret and Jemaine, the try-hard and the nerd, playing themselves as the eponymous Kiwi rock group seeking success in New York. Fellow Kiwi Rhys Darby plays Murray, the NZ consul, who moonlights as their manager. They bumble and stumble through the Big Apple, stalked by their only fan, Mel, and breaking into songs like the excruciatingly funny It’s Business Time that have ensured their cult following in the US.
Flight of the Conchords is the kind of comedy show we should be making here, not Welcome to Paradise, which had pathetic scripts based on little more than 1970s-era, Benny Hill-style smut. One entire episode consisted of banal gags about Brazilian waxes, and that was probably the high point of the series. It was so bad that many people who found it screening on their televisions on Monday nights would have changed channels or turned the set off before the Conchords followed at 10pm.
Conchords works because Jemaine, Bret and Rhys are stand-up comedians, not just actors. Jemaine was equally superb playing himself in Taika Waititi’s very Wellington feature film Eagle v Shark this year (Waititi, one half of the comedy duo Humourbeasts with Jemaine, directed two Conchords episodes, writing one of them). Scripts aside, Paradise fails because its cast are mainly actors, not comedians. It is a further irony, and an embarrassment, that Paradise was made in Wellington. One hopes our television commissioning editors will one day soon wake up to how good the Conchords are and finally let them fly locally.
10 Comments
December 18, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Two things: the DVD is available. Which is how we were able to watch the Conchords at 9.30 every Monday night. Amazon is good, isn’t it.
And it may be that NZ on Air for once did us all a favour when it turned FOC down for funding I think that’s what happened). If they’d made the show here it would have been crap. NZ script editors, NZ directors, TVNZ network executives interfering every step of the way… Hooray for HBO, which knows how to make comedy.
December 18, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I’ve heard that take on this before – Jane Bowron, was it? – that ‘Welcome to Paradise’ fails because the cast are actors not comedians. And I just don’t buy it. I think WtP’s failure must be borne by the writers and script developers – and, ultimately, the directors and the producer.
Actors can do comedy – but if they’re handed a dud script, there’s not much they can do but act the damn thing out. A cast of comedians might have salvaged WtP, but their absence isn’t the reason why it failed.
December 18, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I think you’re short changing Bret and Jemaine’s talents – both are very good actors with an excellent knack for comic timing and writing (and while we’re here, Taika is an amazing actor – I wish he would take the opportunity to act more often).
As Morgue said, actors can do comedy and not be stand up comedians – New Zealand actors Craig Hall, Robbie Magasiva, Lyndee-Jane Rutherford (to name a tiny handful) all pop into mind. Bad scripts/editing is what lets them down.
December 18, 2007 at 5:31 pm
I think you sell Jemaine short a bit by saying he plays himself in EvsS. Whatever it is he is doing in FotC and EvsS it is still acting – and he’s bloody good at it.
December 18, 2007 at 9:19 pm
New Zealand’s curse is the small size of the market. Could you sell a quirky (but excellent) comedy here? Of course not. Its audience would be minuscule and not worth it. So any funding agency, whether commercial or not, would leave FOC alone, because their mission is one way or another to show broad mainstream appeal.
Even Fred Dagg would never make it in NZ today, because no one would take a punt on it. Who’s a farmer? Everything has to be a hit, so everything is pitched at the middle – and it turns out no one lives there. I would hate to be someone responsible for developing NZ comedy, with public or private funds, because I could never ever cock up. No wonder people with public money go for the safe (tho unfunny) option.
I love FoC and I’m glad they have found success and I hope they find more. But I don’t blame NZ tv for not fostering them. No channel in NZ is set up for that any more.
And maybe Welcome To Paradise could have rocked. Or rather, if say 1 in 10 funded things were fantastic, that would be a good track record. Perhaps WTP’s successor will be great. Picking winners in television is worse than picking winners in the stock market – at least businesses in the market have a track record y0u can assess. New art, untried, in the pitch stage, has nothing.
December 19, 2007 at 1:03 pm
I love FOC – big fan – hopefully they repeat the series soon cos’ I missed some episodes 1st time round.
Sticking up for NZ comedy tho’ – have to say i love the West family
December 19, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I think you sell Jemaine short a bit by saying he plays himself in EvsS. Whatever it is he is doing in FotC and EvsS it is still acting – and he’s bloody good at it.
He’s one of the most naturally funny people I’ve met. And he does it like he’s hardly even moving. We recorded an episode of Off the Wire with him once. He came in without having read the script, or really knowing what the show was about. And proceeded to totally burgle it.
Scoop ran a review saying he stole the show, but I didn’t really believe it until I heard it back. He just peeled off one deadpan one-liner after another.
December 19, 2007 at 7:53 pm
And maybe Welcome To Paradise could have rocked. Or rather, if say 1 in 10 funded things were fantastic, that would be a good track record.
The cast member who, by general accclaim, comes out of Welcome to Paradise in good shape is Josh Thompson — who is, to take up our host’s point, a comedian by trade. But the poor old comedians haven’t been able to get the time of day from TV commissioners.
John Clarke came from a performance background. ‘The Phone Call’ on his Greatest Hits is, I think, a proto-Dagg live performance.
December 19, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I loved the skit where the guys in Conchords did rap-style body-and-fingers language at some non-plussed passers-by who were just going about their business, it was an absolute hoot.
‘Rap-style’? – I really don’t know the best language to describe what they did, or how, where or who to, but it was very funny.
March 5, 2008 at 11:07 am
Not a bad article, at least the parts praising the show you like: FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS; but your premise of a comedy show failing because the characters are portrayed by actors and not comedians is just pure crap.
FRIENDS starred six little known non stand-up actors and was one of the biggest hits ever in American Television History.
Likewise none of the cast of ENTOURAGE — which leads into FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS, and in my opinion is much funnier show than CONCHORDS (no accounting for taste) — contains not a single stand-up.
I could go on. But the point is:
Shows can be bad for thousands of reasons, the biggest of which usually is: it adheres to unwritten rules — such as: sitcoms require stand-up comedians to play the parts — that someone — usually a suit — decides is written.