Series creator Bailey Mackey has a very specific answer about how the show came to be and the story he was hoping to tell.

I had a son who's now 25 who lived with his mother on the Gold Coast and I went over to visit him and I remember going to a barbecue restaurant and seeing Māori who were really confident, kind of not sort of, if I could say this, not weighed down by the baggage of where they were from and in some instances, I think, cultural baggage, all over there to make a better version of themselves.

And they were confident, they were good looking.

And it amazed me, like there were a couple of guys Guys that were like laborers that were legitimately talking about, you know, buying some shares or a couple of them had apartments, you know, multiple apartments.

Like one of them had dropped out of school at 14 or 15.

And I thought, man, how the hell do I tell this story? Could I tell it in a reality way? Could I tell it in a live way? Could I tell it in a documentary way?

It has yet to crash headlong into the painful reality of production.

Every single Māori person has relations that have relocated to Australia.