Too Much is a terrible show that I haven’t been able to stop watching. For the first half of the season, I’d convinced myself I was getting a kick out of hate-watching it. But around the sixth or seventh terrible episode of this terrible show, I had to admit that, no, I was actually quite enjoying it.

I stand by the call that Too Much is a terrible show. But it’s also an extremely enjoyable show. Two things that shouldn’t be possible at the same time.

Too Much is the new series from Lena Dunham, the creator, writer and star of the brilliant HBO series Girls. It follows Jess, an American 30-something in London who is deeply not over her ex and embarking on a new relationship with Felix, a manic pixie dream boy.

Girls, which ran for six seasons back in the 2010s, offered an unfiltered portrayal of the lives of four young women. It was funny and serious and joyous and heartbreaking as the tight group lived, loved and eventually left each other’s lives. It may have been about girls, but its themes of friendships and relationships were relatable to all, as were the messy, complicated 20-something lives they were living.

Too Much isn’t so serious. It’s Dunham, squeezing her realistic, autobiographical storytelling into the fanciful rom-com formula to wildly mixed results. And so there’s scenes of cringe sex, drug-induced freakouts and childhood sexual abuse trauma, cuddling up to standard rom-com tropes like voice-overs, dream sequences and fairy tale situations.

Here, the pair’s meet-cute happens in a pub toilet — see also Rose Matafeo’s rom-sitcom Starstruck — shortly after Jess arrives in London, where the handsome and cool yet fragile and troubled musician Felix is performing with his cool indie band in between chain-smoking rollies.

After bonding over bog roll, they hook up and proceed to live out one of the most unpassionate and bored romances I think I’ve ever seen onscreen.

From the get-go, it feels unbelievable. Felix is just too cool for Jess. He’s a hipster deeply entrenched in the indie music world, living in a cool warehouse with cool eco-protestors, and she’s an uncool, loudmouthed, TV ad producer whose idea of flirting is pretty much just negging him.

But even with his issues and their lifestyle differences, the romance doesn’t ring true. Especially as we meet a number of his exes and they’re all extremely cool hipster types, like him. Heck, one of them is an actual French fatale.

In TV and film, we all accept the schlubby guy with the hot girlfriend/partner/wife, so fair play to Dunham for flipping the script on that with a gender reversal. But perhaps having every guy that Jess interacts with fall deeply madly in love/lust with her was going a bit too far.

Her relationship with the gals is just as improbable. She’s constantly told how funny and cool she is by everyone — Felix’s ex, her ex-bf’s new gf, her boss’s wife, her work colleagues, pop star Rita Ora, etc, etc —  despite her obnoxious main character energy. There are at least three scenes where the dialogue is literally someone saying to her, “You’re so funny!”.

The series is based on the real-life love affair of Dunham and her now-husband and Too Much co-creator, Luis Felber. Felber is a handsome and cool English indie musician, sorry, I don’t know if he is also fragile and troubled, but I hope for their sakes that their initial romps weren’t as singlemindedly disinterested as their alter-egos who succumb to carnal desire with the same burning passion and horny enthusiasm as two office workers heading into a 10am WIP meeting.

Early on, Too Much was often so annoying that I thought it had to be on purpose. It made me think Dunham had lost the plot completely as the first two eps are particularly painful. But as I binged through, I began to wonder if she was trying to deconstruct the cliché of the rom-com, before thinking, no, she’s trying to subvert it.

But I was wrong in all of these assessments because ultimately Too Much ends up ticking all the genre boxes of the typical rom-com, right down to Jess’ frantic, final-episode run through the streets to the now-estranged Felix.

This, I believe, is the reason I enjoyed it so much. Underneath all of Dunham’s edgy adornments and purposefully awkward dressing up, the familiarties of the plain ol’ rom-com remain entertaining comfort viewing.

The series jarringly flips between feeling like a rushed first draft to moments of crafted nuance and genuine sincerity, and it has a bad habit of feeling entirely too impressed with itself after comedy bits, but when its odd blend of rom-com fantasy and provocative real-life drama lands, the series really hits.

In its best scenes, it showcases Dunham’s undeniable talent for capturing life’s awkward and/or emotional moments.

The attempts to make Jess the Hannah Horvath for a new generation fall flat. Lead Megan Stalter tries as the obvious Dunham stand-in, but she doesn’t have the trainwreck likability and uncomfortable vulnerability that Dunham infused into Hannah. She’s mostly just irritating.

With Girls, Dunham became the voice of a generation. And while her voice is still distinctive and the heart of this show, Too Much simply had too much to live up to.

It’s hard to see anyone falling in love with it. Instead, consider it a whirlwind romance that you look back fondly on, but can’t quite understand why.

• Viewing info

  Too Much is streaming now on Netflix

Content warning: Suicide, religion, and nudity

When it comes to comedic push back on America’s current regime, we’re used to monologues full of sly digs, comically exasperated rants or smart takedowns based on the day’s news cycle. This was not that. This was something much, much more vicious.

This was satire.

After a year off, South Park returned with the most important half-hour of television so far this year. The episode, titled Sermon on the ‘Mount, is a gleefully brutal and humiliating slaughter of MAGA’s sacred cow and a timely realisation of George Orwell’s famous quote about satire; “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”.

Here, the emphasis is on the word ‘tiny’.

The episode opens with Cartman’s fury over the president's decision to defund public broadcaster NPR because it deprives him of the woke tears he finds hilarious. It spirals him into a C-plot where he forlornly declares “Woke is dead,” before attempting suicide. The unexpected pay-off is satisfyingly woke.

The episode’s B-plot sees the arrival of Jesus at the kids’ primary school. This forced adoption of Christianity riles up the parents who decide to sue the government, crying out, “I didn’t vote for this!” as they gather their pitchforks and Tiki torches.

Which is how we arrive at the main event.

By now, you’ve most likely seen the clips of South Park’s depiction of President Donald J. Trump. They went viral immediately. Crudely animated using actual photos of his face, he’s shown as a cheerful tyrant, jovially bouncing around the White House and threatening to sue everybody while simultaneously commanding them to “Relaaaaax, guy”.

It’s the exact treatment they’ve used once before. For fallen dictator Saddam Hussein.

This alone wouldn’t have been enough to send the White House into what has been reported as “a rage”. Well, with the thin orange skin of this administration, maybe it would have.

But the real fury would have come when Trump was shown getting full frontal naked and cuddling up in bed beside his gay lover, Satan. Something that happened multiple times in the episode.

“I’m not in the mood,” a disgruntled Satan says, rebuffing the persistent advances of his lover. “I can’t even see anything, it’s so small.”

This was an attack on Trump’s manhood and his self-styled image as a successful playboy — an image, it must be stated, that has been thoroughly debunked and stands in stark, disturbing contrast to the reality of the numerous sexual misconduct allegations against him, the civil liability for sexual abuse, and whatever he’s fighting for dear life to prevent coming out in the Epstein files.

For a self-styled tough guy, it wasn’t just a punch in the nose, it was repeated kicks to his tiny nuts.

Only a couple of days earlier, the White House had been gloating about having Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show cancelled and revelling in the power they believed they now possessed to silence their television critics. Finding this to be deeply untrue would have made each of South Park’s kicks sting that much more.

With the townsfolk in rebellion, Jesus attempts to calm the masses by delivering the titular sermon while a jittery 60 Minutes newscrew reports. With his back to the cameras, and in a hushed voice, he implores the crowd to “shut up or we’re going to be cancelled”.

“It’s the fucken’ President, dude! He can do anything to anyone,” Jesus hisses in manic desperation. “All of you shut the fuck up or South Park is over.“

The only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them. After seeing multiple networks acquiesce to the administration, it was glorious to see someone ditch the high road to also get down and dirty. It was way past time someone stood up, fought back and knocked the bully down onto his fat, flabby ass.

There’s also a delicious irony in the fact that South Park’s parent network, Paramount, recently paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit many considered frivolous and tantamount to a bribe. Just last week, Paramount cancelled Colbert to prevent the government scuttling a corporate sale deal while at the same time handing South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone a $1.5 billion cheque for exclusive rights to the series for five years.

How they didn’t see that giving two professional provocateurs ‘Fuck You Money’ might not be a great corporate strategy is beyond me, but hey, I guess that’s why I’m not the CEO of an international entertainment company. Whatever the case, Sermon on the ‘Mount has swung into their plans like a wrecking ball.

If that had been all, it would have been plenty. But South Park still had to deliver their knockout blow.

Heeding Jesus’ advice, the residents agree to pay Trump millions of dollars and produce 50 items of pro-Trump messaging. The first of which, “South Park Pro-Trump PSA, 01 of 50”, closed the episode.

Hot on the heels of Trump’s sharing of an AI video of former President Obama being arrested in the White House, this fake electoral ad showed a photorealistic deep fake of Trump, stumbling naked through the desert, talking to his tiny penis.

“I’m Donald J. Trump,” it squeaked. “And I approve this message.”

It was hilarious. It was horrific. There are 49 more of these to go.

Statements “slamming” South Park were quickly issued from the White House, but only sounded like so much hot air. Through the words of Jesus himself, South Park has dared Trump to come after them. This was just the opening round. It’s clear they believe Trump doesn’t have the cards.

Every joke may have been a tiny revolution, but it was a huge act of defiance. And it all centred around a tiny penis.

Did he do it? A jury of his peers didn’t think so. The makers of ThreeNow’s new documentary Polk: Unanswered Questions, well, they aren’t so sure.

Dubbed the ‘Trial of the Century, ’ the trial of eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne for the murder of his wife Pauline Hanna, dominated the news cycle and the national conversation for months. Given that the details read like the back-of-the-book blurb of a bestselling thriller, this isn’t surprising.

It had everything that captures public imagination: great wealth, dirty meth, prescription drugs, mental health issues, links to sex workers, affairs and grim death, all revolving around a gripping, scandalous mystery; Did Polkinghorne strangle his wife and then stage her suicide in their lovely home in Auckland’s affluent suburb of Remuera?

This question took eight long weeks to argue and 10 hours of deliberation at Auckland’s High Court to answer. Having covered this in their previous documentary, Polk: The Trial of Philip Polkinghorne, the documentary makers don’t retrace their footsteps here. Instead, the focus is on all the nagging doubts and suspicious circumstances surrounding the case. Of which there are so many, a coroner’s inquest into the death begins next month.

As a journalist who covered the trial explains, these eventual findings will not change the results of the trial. But it may offer some closure. For both parties.

Unlike most in the true crime genre, this one doesn’t rely on flash or narrative to draw you in. The case does that by itself. The doco is straightforward and to the point, and better for it.

Polkinghorne and his legal team declined the invitation to appear in the show, which does make the 45-minute documentary fairly one-sided. But, it has to be said, it is an extremely convincing side.

Myriad questions are raised. Why were there bumps and bruises on the deceased’s body? How exactly did Polkinghorne get that suspicious cut smack bang in the centre of his forehead? Why was her bedroom ransacked? Why had Hanna draped her dressing gown over her shoulders instead of putting it on correctly before her death? How did the blood stain on the staircase beside the crime scene grow larger and shift position over 16 months?

And is the 35grams of meth Polkinghorne stashed around the house a normal amount of meth for a recreational user to have? Can you even be a recreational user of meth?

The documentary also raises the question of how some of Polkinghorne’s recollections from the night are crystal clear (like the show they watched on Netflix, what time they each went to bed, the mental state of Hanna), while others (like how he found her hanging from the balustrade of their two story home and how he singlehandedly got her down before the police arrived) are obfuscated by thick, dense brain fog.

Blocked out trauma could be a reasonable answer here. This is not the answer the doco suggests. By not appearing, Polkinghorne doesn’t provide an answer. He didn’t provide one in court either. Nor did he provide one in the interview he gave the documentary makers months before the trial, footage of which is shown here.

This footage, and footage of his defence lawyer from the trial, give Polkinghorne a chance to share his side of the story. The lawyer is as lawyerly as you’d expect, but watching Polkinghorne talk through the events of that night is fascinating. He’s desperate to convince, but comes across like an amateur in a community theatre production of I Am Innocent.

But maybe that’s just how he is. His holiday home neighbours in the Coromandel, and Hanna’s sister-in-law, both paint a picture of a man who could be a gregarious host but carried himself with a slightly off vibe. The neighbour doesn’t hold back, labelling him a big phony and recalling the time her builder had to rescue a distraught woman she suspects was a sex worker from his bach, while a colleague at the eye clinic recounts with visible offence the time he enthusiastically raved about meth before suggesting she give it a go.

But a penchant for sex and drugs doesn’t make a murderer. Polkinghorne’s defence that Hanna was in a mental health crisis, stressed out by work, on anti-depressants and popping sleeping pills like candy, is rubbished by her friends, family and workmates. They describe a woman thriving and say that those who testified about her character and mental state didn’t even know her. Of course, there can be big differences between someone’s professional and personal personas.

But there is another question: Why is he so unsure of the sleeping pill’s name when he was the doctor who prescribed them to her?

This is just another question in a documentary and, by extension murder trial full of them. Like so many questions around the case, it remains unanswered.

Of course, the biggest question of the lot was, did he do it? The evidence didn’t conclusively say he did. The sticking point of the case is that the evidence also didn’t conclusively prove Hanna’s death was a suicide.

This answer just leads to another, more perplexing question: if it wasn’t a murder and it wasn’t a suicide, then what was it? Between the two, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room left.

But the jury wasn’t tasked with answering that. They were presented with the evidence and asked whether there was reasonable doubt to find the defendant guilty or not. They found him not guilty, and the documentary shows the moment Polkinghorne is acquitted.

After eight long weeks of what you have to imagine was an incredibly stressful, difficult and painful trial for an innocent man, the relief on his face and the grief for his dead wife are not palpable.

• Viewing info

  Polk: Unanswered Questions is streaming on ThreeNow

Walt Disney, the ideas man. Walt Disney, the dreamer. Walt Disney, the grudge-holding tyrant? Check, check and check.

The multitudes contained within the creative visionary, whose very name became synonymous with good old-fashioned family entertainment, are examined in comprehensive detail in the fascinating new documentary Walt Disney: The Devil in the Dream Factory.

This is a doco that asks a lot of its viewers. Mostly, time. At almost four hours long, it sounds like way too much Disney. I’ll admit that if I’d noticed its running time before I started watching, I wouldn’t have.

It may be streaming for free on YouTube, but Devil in the Dream Factory (DitDF) is not mere user-generated content. It is a cinematic and exhaustive deep dive into the remarkable story of a man whose stubborn refusal to be refused undeniably changed the course of entertainment forever.

“He was always optimistic about his ability and about the value of his ideas,” his business manager recalls early on, as we see photos of a struggling Disney scrambling to raise cash to fund his first animated short, 1923’s Alice’s Wonderland, along with some wonderfully wobbly test footage. “He believed in himself. And he believed in what he was trying to accomplish.”

Throughout DitDF, we see Disney’s unyielding self-belief play out time and time again.

Whether navigating the financially precarious waters his fledgling studio constantly sailed into during its formative years, envisioning a theme park that would leave visitors feeling like they’d walked into one of his animated films, or constructing EPCOT, a futuristic and livable “Community of Tomorrow”, as a blueprint for America’s (and he quietly hoped, the world’s) townplanners to follow, Disney didn’t just run with his ideas; he obstinately willed them into existence, steamrolling over any opposition he encountered.

The documentary shows how this attitude led to artistic — and, it must be acknowledged, financial — triumphs, like his groundbreaking, history-making, debut feature film 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But it also highlights the flip side, showing how it also led to him ferociously battling against the rights of his staff, and even going so far as to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 that he suspected some of his studio’s prized senior animators were communists.

What he neglected to tell HUAC was that his suspicions were greatly influenced by the fact that these animators were also the same ones behind the bitter studio strike of 1941 that disrupted production for four months.

For those counting, Disney held that grudge for six years before enacting revenge for what he saw as a great betrayal. To ensure he didn’t forget during that time, he’d recorded all of the striking workers’ names in a book.

This self-belief also led to culturally insensitive disasters like 1946’s Song of the South, where Disney ignored all advice and warnings about the film’s racial stereotypes. Tellingly, it has never been released for sale or added to streaming services, not even Disney+.

This contrast between the art and the man was there from the start. He frequently had long falling outs with his brother and business partner, Roy, without whom the name Walt Disney would merely be a footnote on Wikipedia, even with all of Walt’s determination and drive.

DitDF charts his entire life, from his birth in 1901 and childhood in rural Missouri, to his deathbed in a hospital near his now world-famous Californian movie studio in 1966. Even then, as cancer tightly squeezed his lungs, he wouldn’t be stopped, coughing out instructions to Roy of the route that the monorail should take through EPCOT’s streets.

In his studio, Disney was a feared taskmaster, high on demand and expectation and short on recognition or praise. He demanded nothing less than complete artistry.

A stern adult, he nevertheless managed to retain his childlike imagination and creativity. His own childhood had been bereft of love and he dedicated his art to ensuring children, not just his own but the worlds, never felt like that.

Of all of his creations, perhaps the one he worked hardest on was that of Walt Disney. As Disney’s success grew, he carefully and purposefully culitvated his image. A frequent presence in the media and on Disney’s TV shows he fashioned himself into the friendly uncle type he romantcised himself to be, instead of the hard media mogul that he was.

This conflict of character was not lost on Disney.

"I'm not Walt Disney,” he acknowledged. “I do a lot of things Walt Disney would not do. Walt Disney does not smoke. I smoke. Walt Disney does not drink. I drink.”

This conflict of character is just one element of DitDF, even though it provides the doco with its sensational title. It is incredibly well-rounded, focusing on how his great works came to be, how an entertainment empire was built and managed, and how he lived his family life.

There are frank interviews with many key players, including those wronged by Disney, as well as experts and historians, and the story is told through a treasure trove of archival photos that encompass Disney’s entire life as well as oodles of archival films and home movies.

He may have been a devil in the dream factory, but that doesn’t change the fact that his factory was still manufacturing dreams. He wasn’t just selling the sentimental ideals and wholesome values celebrated in his greatest works. He wholeheartedly believed in them.

At the height of his and his studio’s fame, he was accused of “making corn,” eg corny movies. Intended as a slight against the man and his life’s work, he didn’t take the bait.

Instead, Walt Disney smiled..

“I like corn,” he said.

• Viewing info

  The Devil in the Dream Factory is free to watch on the Best Documentary YouTube channel. You can watch it here.

Just last month, Time magazine asked, ‘Why isn’t Mike Birbiglia more famous?’. An odd question to ask of a comedian who has just released his seventh comedy special, written, directed and been the star of two films, steadily popped up in supporting roles in sitcoms and movies for over a decade, and been nominated for an Emmy.

Even still, there’s some validity to the question. Mike Birbiglia is famous, world-famous even. I’m writing about him in little old Aotearoa after all. I do agree with Time that he should be more famous. However, unlike Time, I do not find his relative non-fame a source of confusion. I feel it’s pretty bloody obvious.

His specials can’t be easily butchered and dissected to create lol-generating, 15-second Reels, Shorts or TikToks. His routines aren’t topical or controversial or outrageous. He’s not loud or angry or obnoxious. He doesn’t wade into the culture wars or bash the Trans community. He doesn’t even really tell jokes.

He smiles a lot.

None of these things work in today’s algorithm-influenced society. When I’m mindlessly doomscrolling humorous videos about our collective cratering mental health, outrage-inducing videos about politics or terrifying videos about the imminent apocalypse, I’m never intermittently presented with a clip of Mike Birbiglia talking about his absent father the way it forcefeeds me vids of that mullet guy or that annoying cadre of loudmouth comedians-turned-podcasters saying stupid shit.

What I’m saying is that Mike Birbiglia’s comedy is out of step with the times. He’s less a stand-up comedian and more of a storyteller. I hesitate to even call what he does ‘a routine’, because really, it’s a one-man show. An hour-long monologue by an expert craftsman. A diaristic journey that sees him aiming for your heartstrings as much as your funny bone.

So it was a good day when his new special, The Good Life, popped up unexpectedly on Netflix. Because there are often large gaps between specials, whenever one appears, it feels like spotting a rare bird fluttering outside your window or discovering a couple of bonus potato fritters with your fish n’ chips order.

Settling in to watch The Good Life, I was curious where he was going to lead us. He took us straight to the hospital, where his father lay in critical condition after suffering a stroke.

Are you laughing yet?

From there, we zoomed back in time to his childhood and his stories of growing up with a dad who liked nothing more than sitting on his lounge chair reading war stories and nothing less than spending time with his love-starved children.

Funny stuff, I’m sure we can agree.

His father’s medical emergency leads him to face mortality, both his dad’s and his own, the nature of their relationship and also forces him to confront the failings in the way he parents his young daughter. His musings on death and life naturally spill into love and marriage, and his well-mined medical condition, REM sleep behaviour disorder, a condition that sees him physically acting out his dreams while asleep, sometimes violently, and that forces him to be literally chained to his bed each night.

Maybe it’s the way he tells ‘em, because despite these dour and bleak topics, The Good Life is extremely funny. Even if Birbiglia is still clearly raw from the pain of recently living through it all.

Still, amongst all this, there are some concessions to modern comic trends. The Good Life sees him engaging in a spot of crowd work. An invitation to the Vatican to meet Pope Francis doubles as an invitation for scandal, with Birbiglia lobbing many spiky barbs at the Catholic church’s ongoing blind eye to the atrocious child molestation that’s been going on for decades within its ranks.

I never expected a shuffly, middle-aged man in a bland sweater to drop one of 2025’s biggest — and side-splittingly funny — ‘Did he just say that?!?’ mic drops, yet here we are.

The Good Life is a good time, even if on paper it doesn’t sound like it. And while it doesn’t hit the extreme highs of his breakthrough, 2008’s What I Should Have Said Was Nothing and 2013’s follow-up My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, it’s still head and shoulders above recent specials from comedians that Time would no doubt identify as ‘famous’.

• Viewing info

  The Good Life is streaming now on Netflix, along with three of his previous specials, The Old Man and the Pool, The New One, and Thank God for Jokes. Sadly, it looks like his two towering achievements, What I Should Have Said Was Nothing and My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, are not currently being offered by any local streamer.

Around the halfway mark of every episode of Stick, I’ll turn to my wife and say, “I kind of hate this show.”. Then I’ll keep watching until the end credits roll and the ‘Next Episode’ button pops up, at which point I’ll ask if she wants to watch another one.

It’s a maddening loop, like being trapped in a low-stakes, low-effort Groundhog Day. But unlike Bill Murray’s character in that classic film, I won’t be freed by difficult self-improvement or acts of kindness. No. My redemption will only come after sitting through all 10 episodes of this easygoing, annoying, schmaltz-embracing dreck.

Please, have mercy on my soul.

Stick is a feel-good sports comedy, and boy, does it swing hard into the ‘feel-good’ part of that label. It stars Owen Wilson doing the most Owen Wilson-y performance of his career as washed-up, ex-golf pro Pryce ‘Stick’ Cahill. He’s joined by Marc Maron doing his engagingly cranky Marc Maron thing as Stick’s former caddie, Mitts. Together, they’re the show’s not-so-secret Sweet & Sour sauce.

If Stick were about these two has-beens hitting the comeback trail and trying to become, er, now-is’ (?) again, it’d be an undisputed winner. Sadly, it’s not.

Instead, it’s about Stick mentoring Santi, a mildly troubled teenage golf prodigy he talent-spotted at the driving range and transferred all of his broken dreams onto. And while the kid can whack the bejebus out of the ball, he’s temperamental and prone to disappearing into his head. A classic Achilles heel of many a golf pro and the hordes of wannabes who hit the links each weekend.

The only hitch is that Santi has no interest. He doesn’t want to play golf because his father, who used to coach him, skipped out on the family. Golf is a painful reminder, so he wants nothing to do with the game, which I guess is why he keeps sneaking onto the driving range to spend hours whacking balls.

Well, we all deal with trauma in our own way, I suppose. But, as they say, there’s no show without Punch, so after Stick delivers an extremely Owen Wilson pep talk, Santi is all in.

Stick then has to convince Santi’s mum that he’s legit and should be allowed to take her son on an eight-week road trip around the amateur golf tournament circuit. She’s reluctant until he busts out the ol’ Owen Wilson charm — and a $100,000 cheque. Then she too, is all in.

With everyone onboard, the four of them get on board Mitts’ RV campervan and head off on a journey to fulfil Santi’s star potential and Cahill’s failed one. Out on the road, there’s light golf action, tepid confrontation, blossoming romance, breezy laughs, rousing motivational speeches and a relentlessly pleasant vibe that makes the whole thing mildly enjoyable.

Yes, it’s blatantly aping Apple TV+’s other feel-good sports comedy, Ted Lasso, which was a massive hit, and the whole thing is basically a tone-adjusted reimagining of Adam Sandler’s 1996 sports comedy classic, Happy Gilmore. But its cosy atmosphere gets it over the hump of its cheesier moments and seen-it-all-before plotting.

However, when going shot-for-shot against those two crowd favourites, Stick’s putt comes up short. It’s too obvious to outshine the former and not funny enough to out-lol the latter. But that’s not to say its shot has landed in the rough.

It’s an undemanding watch that doesn’t outstay its welcome — something I appreciate more and more these days. Storywise, it keeps things moving, and while it never lands any laugh-out-loud gags, it offers a decent number of light chuckles.

The show’s watchability is entirely down to Wilson and Maron. Their performances as themselves verge on parody — especially Wilson, who milks his laconic drawl and engaging get-away-with-anything likeability for all its worth. But the pair have wonderful chemistry, with Wilson’s stoned positivity rubbing up against Maron’s weary curmudgeon schtick to create a dynamic that’s amusing and engaging.

They make the show tolerable during its more saccharine moments, clichéd story beats or whenever the show leans into situational drama, which is nearly every time Santi is on screen.

The teen is easily the weakest part of the show, despite being critically important to it. He’s an underdog who isn’t really. Before putting down his putter, he was winning tournaments, and he still carries a smug attitude about his skills. It makes it hard to root for the guy.

Stick is also processing trauma; there’s the fall from grace after a career meltdown on live television, his subsequent divorce and the tragic reason behind these two life-changing events. The difference being that you do root for Stick because Wilson is so damn likable.

And Mitts? You bet he’s got problems too. Really, Stick should be labelled a sports-dramedy.

These moments are when I kind of hate Stick. It can be so lame! But, it’s also smart enough not to linger on its melodrama and keep the ball rolling along the green towards the hole.

The biggest weakness in Stick’s game is that it sticks rigidly to the advice Stick gives Santi on the fairway: play it safe and don’t take unnecessary risks. Stick is all predictable and safe choices. This gets the show around the course, sure, but with little flair or excitement.

On the fairway, Santi ignores his mentor, instead choosing to wallop the ball over the obstructing trees and directly to the green rather than dropping an extra shot to go safely around them. It’s a bold and risky move that pays off handsomely.

If only the writers had shown some of their character’s imagination, they may have really been onto something.

• Viewing info

  Stick is streaming on Apple TV+. The first four episodes are available now, with new episodes landing weekly.

It was only a few short years ago that the phrase ‘post-fact reality’ referred to Donald Trump’s endless barrage of lies and the parroting of his blatant BS by his smiling allies at Fox News and whichever press secretary managed to last longer than one Scaramucci.

Fast-forward to the present, and that now seems so quaint. As the old joke goes, it was easy to tell when Trump was lying — he was moving his lips.

Last week, we truly entered the post-fact reality with the release of Google’s Veo3. This generative AI is capable of creating photo-realistic videos from simple text prompts. It is both wildly impressive and certainly a harbinger of doom.

Creating realistic videos, like, say, a news broadcast, is now as simple as typing, ‘create a realistic news broadcast’.

In the blink of an eye, we have gone from this:

to this

If things were bad in the so-called Information Age, when all nefarious players had at their disposal were memes, Twitter bots and photo-generating AI, then things are about to get extremely bad, extremely quickly.

Sorry to bum out your Saturday morning.

This brings us to Mountainhead, a new satire from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong. Releasing on Neon tomorrow, this has to be one of the most timely releases of all time.

The film follows four billionaire tech-bros as they head to the mountains for their annual poker weekend. While inspired by our current crop of real-world billionaires, none of the characters here are direct facsimiles. They share the same arrogance and abhorrence, but not their personas.

Steve Carrell is Randall, the “Papa Bear” of the group who is refusing to accept his cancer diagnosis as terminal and views humans as "simpletons”, Jason Schwartzman is Soups, the host of the weekend at his titular mountain estate and someone who is extremely insecure over his paltry wealth (a mere $521million) compared to his billionaire buddies.

The two young bucks of ‘The Brewsters’ are Venis, a stereotypical tech-doosh, whose social media network Traam has just released the equivalent of Veo3 to predictably dire consequences and Jeff, an impressionable youngster whose leading AI company is the only force capable of roping in the unfolding global chaos unleashed by Venis’ tech, due to its ability to label fake videos from real.

Ramy Youssef brings a puppy-dog quality to Jeff, while Cory Michael Smith is highly punchable playing tech's biggest bro.

The weekend starts fun enough, with the four tech-bros ragging on each other, racing snowmobiles and partaking in their annual rituals of wealth. But things take a sinister turn as violence erupts around the world, and fake news videos lead nations into conflict.

“You’re always going to get some people dead,” Venis shrugs, as justification for his AI-tech, before referencing the deaths that followed the invention of the wheel and other markers of human innovation.

As their phones buzz to notify them of the latest catastrophe, they share a brief moment of doubt. But it doesn’t last long, with the loudmouthed Venis declaring, “Nothing means anything – and everything’s funny!”

It’s a very internet philosophy and one that leads the four techno-crats to decide the only way for humanity to survive is for them to run things. They start brainstorming countries they can “coup out” and take over.

They quickly reach the same conclusion.

“Coup out the U.S?” Soups asks as the scope of their plan leads to the inevitable. “That’s a pretty big enchilada.”

This should sound frighteningly familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention and will, at the very least, remind those who haven’t of Elon Musk and his DOGE goons.

The group’s zingy rhetoric explores and perfectly captures the deluded and megalomanical ideas of the “Trans-Human” world envisioned by the actual real-world billionaires in which they rule supreme, freed from pesky Government regulations and oversight.

In Mountainhead, this rule would last forever over us simpletons as they speculate ways to perfect consciousness uploads, guesstimated as “five years away” and something very much on the mind of the terminally sick Randall.

This made-for-TV movie is set entirely in the luxurious mountain retreat and, as Succession fans would expect, is extremely talky with joke-laden dialogue. But, to borrow a sports phrase, I found it to be a movie of two halves.

The first, dragged. The four bro-llionaires were launching plenty of zippy jokes at each other, but most didn’t fly. By necessity, none of the characters are likable, which made me question why I was watching a non-funny film about total dooshbags.

It felt like it should be much funnier than it was.

That all changed in the second half of the movie, when a split in philosophy between the four wannabe-alphas creates a killer problem. Their attempts to rationalise and solve their self-enforced dilemma are brilliantly comic, combining rapid wordplay and physical comedy in a laugh-out-loud fashion.

It is worth the wait.

Even still, there is one big glitch with the film. Even with its blistering production schedule, it only finished shooting last month, its satirical POV is already outdated thanks to Google’s Veo3 release. It makes the satirical comedy feel more like an episode of Black Mirror.

Mountainhead posits the arrival of a world we could all see coming, but thought there was time to adequately prepare for. Well, that world arrived a few days ago, and we are all now living in it. And we are not prepared whatsoever.

Enjoy your long weekend!

• Viewing info

  Mountainhead is streaming on Neon from tomorrow.

Thank Gawd for Tina Fey. Without wanting to sound flippant, I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to pick up where Woody Allen’s cancellation left off. With The Four Seasons, Fey has.

For a lot of people, this will not sound at all like a recommendation. Acknowledging, but setting aside, the serious allegations tied to Allen’s private life, smart dramedies about comfortably wealthy, middle-aged white couples in various stages of relationship crises are not everyone’s glass of Pinot. I get that.

Me? I’ll happily sip away on that genre all night. I love the snappy dialogue, the philosophical zings, the emotional disarray, the wealth porn and the soft twangs of wistful melancholy. Mostly, I dig the realistic — albeit, heightened — take on how relationships actually (dys)function in the real world as opposed to viewing them through the melodramatically cheesy filter that’s usually applied onscreen.

Many have tried to keep the genre alive. Writer/director Noah Baumbach got close with 2019’s Marriage Story, his commitment to the bit leading him to fictionalise his real-life divorce. I liked it, but it’s mostly remembered these days for turning its two lead actors into a meme.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise that it would be Fey stepping up. Her criminally underrated Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt explored existential themes through its neurotic main character while also embracing an unpredictable absurdity.

Flashes of her wild absurdist streak surface in The Four Seasons, but the show mostly plays it straight with her keenly observed understanding of the preoccupations and quiet failings of middle-aged life. It is an absolute treat.

The eight-part series follows three married couples in their 50s throughout a life-changing year. It starts at the end of one marriage and then re-joins the splintered friend group at each of their seasonal holidays, allowing months to happen off-screen before catching us, and them, up with their ever-evolving (devolving?) circumstances.

The show is based on Alan Alda’s 1981 film of the same name, which, up until 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, was the best Woody Allen film not made by Woody Allen. Film fans, and those who remember watching M*A*S*H reruns at 6pm on TV2, will no doubt get a kick out of Alda’s delightful cameo in Fey’s show, while Allen’s influence is acknowledged with a deep dive reference to 1983’s Zelig.

While two of the show’s couples fit the stock-standard template for this sort of thing, the series highlights our shifting societal make-up and Fey’s progressive views by having the third a mixed-race gay couple in a somewhat open marriage.

Fey stars as Kate, the pragmatic and dryly sarcastic wife of her college sweetheart, Jack, a go-with-the-flow people pleaser played by Will Forte.

Colman Domingo plays the gossipy, fun-loving Danny, whose attempts to downplay a serious health issue begin to strain his relationship with his overprotective and increasingly clingy husband, Claude, played by Marco Calvani.

And rounding off the trio is Steve Carell’s Nick, whose unfulfilling marriage to his wife Anne, played by Kerri Kenney, sees him driving away from the marriage in a flashy Porsche and hooking up with a 32-year-old dental hygienist named Ginny (Erika Henningsen).

Anne and Nick’s divorce has a seismic impact on the well-established group dynamic. Holiday plans now need to accommodate the lawyered-up exes, and there’s a natural awkwardness as Nick tries to integrate his much younger partner into the group.

As the year and the holidays roll on, the cracks in each relationship become impossible to ignore. The show is all about how the characters choose to confront — or avoid — their issues and the portrayal of the changing dynamics, both between couples and within their wider friend group.

From the sudden, explosive divorce to the quiet wilting of Kate and Jack’s marriage, much of it will feel deeply familiar to those of a certain age, either through lived experience or witnessing others. Fey also brings a pitch-perfect touch to exploring middle-aged malaise, creeping mortality, the complexities of family and friend dynamics and how all of this shapes not just your life, but the lives of the people you love. Or loved.

Which is all sounding a bit heavy. It is, but it’s also not. The show’s razor-sharp humour is always humming, like an idling car engine ready to race off at a moment’s notice.

There’s an abundance of zippy, often snippy, one-liners and scenes thick with witty banter.

“This hotel is the equivalent of a white guy with dreads,” Danny grumbles to Nick shortly after arriving at the eco-yurt campground Ginny has picked for their summer getaway, or brutally efficient burns like, “Complaining is their version of sex.”

There are also comedic set pieces that show off the cast’s comic chops, like Carell slipping into full cringe mode as he awkwardly asks Ginny to be his girlfriend, or Fey and Forte uncomfortably trying to follow their marriage counsellor’s argument-resolution strategies.

The Four Seasons is talky, sharply funny, occasionally absurd, and not without its emotional gut-punches.

Much like real life, then.

• Viewing Info

  The full season of The Four Seasons is streaming on Netflix now.

The feature-length documentary, Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, is about so much more than the crooner’s journey to connect with his Māori heritage and make Te Whare Tīwekaweka, his latest album sung completely in te reo. Whether intentional or not, it also highlights the two vastly different worlds that sit uncomfortably close together in our country, and leaves you with a serious choice to make when its credits roll.

But before that, the movie charts Williams’ struggle with his cultural identity and his soulful longing to not only find his place but also to find himself. The album acts as a conduit and, in many ways, a cover to allow him to do so. Or to at least take the first tentative steps in that ongoing journey. As his mentor, collaborator and language advisor Kommi Tamati-Elliffe tells him, the mahi can’t just be for an album or himself, it has to be for future generations. To inspire and educate. To make them proud of their heritage in a country that often doesn’t.

It’s a serious business, but director Ursula Grace Williams [not related to Marlon] keeps the movie’s vibe light and breezy. Her camera is filled with air and space, showcasing the stunning beauty of our landscapes in the most naturalistic, low-key way possible. As a cinematic postcard to attract tourists, we may finally have a worthy successor to Sir Peter’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But it’s also light and breezy when it comes to the nitty gritty. It floats past the touchpoints of the singer’s life, rather than landing and exploring. So while it shows him revisiting his childhood home, still not repaired and uninhabitable 11 years on from the devastating Christchurch earthquake, and charts his journey from Dylan-inspired 9-year-old in a natty suede jacket, to choir-boy nerd to world famous alt-country troubadour and part-time movie star, it devotes as much time to that journey as I have in this paragraph.

In this regard, Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds should be considered more a snapshot of the singer’s last few years than a dedicated biography. Even with Williams’ mindful reflections on his past and his uncertain future.

This doesn’t mean it’s anything less than constantly engaging viewing. Williams’ natural charm, presence and all-around nice guy persona can’t help but pull you in. The dude’s an extremely likable fellow whose charisma isn’t restricted to the stage, and whose thoughtfulness isn’t restricted to the film’s voiceover. For example, we see him ambling down a fire escape on the side of a building to chat with a group of middle-aged women in Melbourne who couldn’t get tickets to his show but spotted him having a cheeky ciggie on the venue’s balcony and started loudly calling out to him.

And if he’s at all image-conscious, it doesn’t show. Indeed, he can come off as a bit of a goof like when he’s engaging in a fierce and lengthy battle with a corkscrew and a bottle of wine or proudly showing off his gnarly toenails while grinning like a schoolboy and admitting that the horrendous sight will cause him “to lose a few fans”.

It may sound like it, but the doco’s not really a hangout film, although there is a lot of hanging out; at his home, on tour, in recording studios and on visits with his mum and dad that see him trying, and sometimes failing, to not revert into teenager mode — something even the oldest of us can be guilty of when spending time with our folks.

There’s also candid footage of Williams collaborating with fellow folkie and former partner Aldous Harding, whose breakup inspired his breakthrough album Make Way for Love, but is not at all mentioned here, and his collab with global pop superstar Lorde in a knockout performance as they record Kāhore He Manu E together, the first single from his reo album.

There are fun montages and killer live footage from life on the road and frank, anxious conversations with Williams musing on the detrimental effects this transient lifestyle is having on his health, relationships and well-being.

But aside from the showbiz stuff, the film reveals the mostly ordinary existence of an extraordinary talent who deeply and desperately feels the need to connect with his heritage and find his footing in the two worlds he inhabits.

The movie is about this journey. But the movie becomes about Aotearoa’s journey when Don Brash intrudes via a disgusting vocal clip of the former National Party leader pompously declaring te reo —and, by extension, Māori culture — to be “not of value”.

This film amply shows its value in a beautifully understated and honest way. Not just to Marlon Williams, but to Aotearoa New Zealand as a whole. Because we may be one country, but there are two very different worlds living here.

One is a world where music can act as the great unifier, bridging the cultural gap and giving all people a path to come together, to celebrate each other and embrace what makes Aotearoa such a special and unique place.

The other is a world that wants to burn those bridges and instead build barricades from which to lob sneers and hate while grotesquely masquerading under the delusion of being civilised people.

And that’s not a world I want any part of.

Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds shows Marlon Williams’ journey into his heritage. It shows the rest of us the two paths leading to the future of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

You’ll need to decide for yourself which path you choose to walk down.

• Viewing info

Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds is in cinemas now.

The term ‘Prestige TV’ used to refer to a bold, thinky show crafted with a cinematic vision. These shows were driven by an artistic mindset completely absent from the sausage factory-produced, hospital dramas, police procedurals, reality shows and canned-laughter sitcoms that traditionally dominated the TV schedule.

And, if we’re honest, still do.

Prestige shows pushed past the boundaries of what television could be and embraced the series format to tell complex, long-form stories that movies simply didn’t have time for. These days, however, ‘Prestige TV’ just means a show that has movie stars slumming it on the small screen for a streaming service and a budget that would make a summer blockbuster movie envious.

MobLand is a prime example of this paradigm change. The series has A-List stars, an A-List director, and money to burn. But despite outward appearances and its inward aspirations, it is in no way a deep or complex show.

That doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. It is. But the extended serial format and its delusions of prestige only serve to highlight its almost-fatal flaws. If director Guy Ritchie had taken a Tommy gun to the script, he could have easily shot the fat off its 10 episodes and made a cracker of a movie.

Not that MobLand is ploddingly paced or padded out. The show moves at the machine gun pace of Ritchie’s signature snappy rhythms, as it follows Harry, a fixer for an Irish mob family, as he stomps through London’s seedy underbelly, rushing from one gang-related crisis to the next in a constant, seemingly futile, effort to set things right. It’s a high-stakes game of Whack-a-Mole, where if he misses the mole, he’s the one who gets whacked.

The show pops up plenty for Harry to deal with, but its central thread is the grisly murder of a rival mob boss’s son and the involvement of a Harrigan in this unfortunate situation. To prevent an all-out gang war, Harry has to carefully pick his way through the mess as he attempts to diffuse the escalating tension between the two families and keep himself alive while doing so.

Star Tom Hardy plays Harry with a compelling mix of menacing purpose and geezer charisma. It’s no coincidence that when he’s not on screen, the show slumps.

Pierce Brosnan plays Conrad, the gentlemanly-but-violent patriarch of the Harrigans, and Helen Mirren emits gleeful malice as his ruthlessly calculating wife, Maeve. Mirren and Brosnan are both screen legends, but here they seem to be in direct competition to see who can deliver the corniest Oirish accent this side of Dublin. This is fairly distracting, to be sure. That said, their hammy double act as an old married couple is a wonderful pleasure.

All this family gangster stuff is top drawer. As you’d expect. This sort of thing is Guy Ritchie’s happy place after all. It’s when he widens the scope of the story that the show falls into the traps of Prestige TV’s trappings.

As well as trying to prevent a deadly gang war, Harry also has marital problems to deal with, errands to run for various lower rung Harrigans, detectives to be wary of and a favour to do for his house cleaner. These threads all spin off into their own stories, with their own supporting casts, and while they do appear to be slowly making their way to linking up, so far, they haven’t been worth the effort.

At best, they’ve given Hardy more opportunity to flex both his menace and his comedy chops, but at worst, they pull you out of MobLand’s gritty and engaging world with their implausibility. The subplot involving his wife is particularly guilty of this. Filling out the world is actively making this show worse. But even the main story doesn’t require a Harry level of street smarts to spot the twists and turns coming a mile away.

So why keep watching? Well, the show is packed with Ritchie’s signature flash. It’s often tense, often quite funny, and routinely punctuated by bursts of stylish, bloody action and the ever-present threat of violence. It misses the mark as a new entry in the Prestige TV canon, but it at least hits the board, delivering an experience that’s entertaining, even addictive. I’ve found myself genuinely looking forward to each new weekly episode.

But let’s be clear, it’s Hardy who is carrying the show. Without him, it’d quickly break apart. In MobLand, he’s not just playing a fixer. He is one.

• Viewing info

MobLand is streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes each Sunday. It is currently halfway through its ten-episode season.

There is nothing funny about aviation safety. The second season of comedian Nathan Fielder’s comedy show The Rehearsal is all about aviation safety. It is not funny.

It’s so much more than that.

At this point, calling Nathan Fielder a comedian is like calling Neil Finn a songwriter1. Yes, it’s technically correct, but it woefully downplays the genius on display whenever either one opens their mouth to perform.

With The Rehearsal, Fielder has transcended the ‘comedian’ label. He’s now more of an avant-garde provocateur, pushing comedy and his audience into strange and uncomfortable new places. Amusing you no longer seems his goal. So then, what is?

The idea behind The Rehearsal is simple and humorously bizarre. It’s a quasi-documentary series built around the concept of “rehearsing” life’s big moments to help people prepare for them. The first season began innocently enough, with Fielder helping a socially awkward man practice confessing a long-held lie to his pub quiz teammates.

But Fielder took the preparation to extreme lengths. He constructed a perfectly faithful, working replica of the pub, right down to the menu, on a giant soundstage and filled it with actors playing patrons.

From there, the show spiralled into a dark abyss of anxiety and unfolding meta-realities that saw Fiedler facing a very real existential crisis. I wrote about it in my NZ Herald column at the time, titling the piece How Nathan Fielder's show The Rehearsal broke my brain.

After that, he returned with The Curse, a mostly scripted, even more surreal, dramedy that saw Fielder playing a character instead of living his comedy persona. This, I said, pushed cringe comedy to breaking point.

The second season of The Rehearsal doesn’t do this. Instead, Fielder just flat-out breaks cringe comedy.

Like season one, it starts innocently enough. But where there was comedy to be found in the extremely awkward exchanges between the quiz enthusiast and Fielder, this time we open with our host diving into his detailed and thorough research on commercial-flight aeroplane crashes and sharing his theory on how to prevent them with a retired aviation expert and lobbyist.

It’s as dry as it sounds, a fact Fielder freely acknowledges when his voiceover reveals that, while he has the money to attempt to prove his idea, the strings attached by HBO are that the cash must be used to make a comedy series.

“So far, I was failing,” he admits, in his downtrodden monotone. “We were over 10 minutes into this episode with zero laughs.”

The laughs do come. But I can’t say how. Or when. To do so would be to spoil everything about the show. You want to go in knowing as little as humanly possible. Even now, I fret I’ve said too much…

Nevertheless, I will say that it’s six episodes frequently left me flabbergasted and in awe at the extreme lengths Fielder went to so he could achieve the level of WTF this second season hits. We are talking Tom Cruise levels of commitment to the bit.

But it’s not just the mindbogglingly bizarre detours and wildly askew non-sequiturs he gallops down while attempting to prove his safety hypothesis that impresses. It’s also the mountains of research he presents to back up his theories. This isn’t just me falling for clever editing and the magic of television. The experts, therapists and pilots he pitches his idea to are also all convinced by it.

Even if his methods leave them scratching their heads. As well they should.

The title alone of episode four’s title, Kissme, should be enough to get your skin crawling in discomfort, while episode two, Star Potential, goes so far off the rails it’s hard to see how Fielder can veer back to the show’s stated destination of improving aviation safety. The final episode, My Controls, is unfathomably ambitious, a total blindsider and staggeringly executed.

But the high point of the season is episode three, Pilot’s Code. It strides confidently beyond cringe-comedy and into a brave new, previously undiscovered territory of uncomfortableness. On top of that, it also solves a mystery surrounding a famous, near-tragic aviation emergency with an exhaustively researched answer that is both indisputable, thanks to the mountains of evidence Fielder provides, and satisfyingly absurd.

It is simply genius television.

But is it funny?

It is impossible to watch The Rehearsal and not be shoved far outside your comfort zone. It will be too much for some. Others just won’t get it. But those who do click with its arty agitations and subversive stomping on comedy tropes will find it incredibly funny and nothing short of brilliant.

But be warned, there are no easy laughs to be found. With The Rehearsal, Fielder makes you work as hard as he does for them. And there is no practice run.

• Viewing info

The Rehearsal’s second season begins streaming with episode one, Gotta Have Fun, on Neon later today, with new episodes dropping weekly. Neon also has the entire first season available, which I’d recommend watching first.

Every Thursday morning for almost 11 years I dragged my sorry ass out of bed at an unholy hour of the morning to write a weekly film, television and pop culture column for the New Zealand Herald.

That part of it sucked. At least until I’d finished my first cup of coffee. But all the other parts were a strange joy. And, now that I don’t have to do it anymore, I’ve realised how addicting it was. I think I’ll keep doing it.

So, please join me here at Screen Crack. I’ll shoot a weekly hit of writing on the most addictive film and TV straight to your inbox.

Starting next week. Right now, I think I’ve earned a sleep-in.