Three

It's happiness.

I mean, it's a musical comedy, which is not something that New Zealand has a long history in, but it really was a bit of a surprise hit, I think, for TV3.

And this was from creators Kip Chapman and Luke DeSoma, produced by Greenstone Television.

And it's a wonderful, wonderful feel-good comedy with a very strong musical backbone through it.

So, yeah, hats off to these guys.

And if you haven't seen it yet, definitely go and check out season one and then follow on to season...

Season 2, which is now available on TV3 on the on-demand platform.

Good stuff.

Are you leaving? Wow, things are in really bad shape if these kinds of people are leaving.

So that was, basically, the situation at the tail end of 2024, as both TVNZ and TV3 felt acute financial pressure and, as a result, simply couldn't afford to fund Re-Audi TV the way they had before.

I remember when I used to work in television, the saying was, it's dying, but it's dying a slow and lucrative death.

Yeah, still a slow death, not quite as lucrative anymore.

Come on in here, guys.

Get in here.

Just after TV3 announced News Hub would be ending, TVNZ dropped its own bombshell.

But what got a bit lost in the very reasonable coverage of the crisis in news and current affairs was the fact that TV3 announced at the same time that they would no longer be fully funding any local TV production.

Ordinary people, extraordinary situations.

Geoff Stephen can reasonably claim to be one of the godfathers of reality TV in New Zealand, as an early commissioner at TV3 during the genre's emergence.

A documentary supposedly used to be sort of so-called objective.

It had to look at both sides of the story.

But, you know, they were becoming more and more frivolous.

I often said, oh, we're going to run out of people to make a documentary on.

In the late 90s, editor and director William Tepfer was firmly entrenched in the world of TV documentaries, making programs for TVNZ's DocumentaryNZ and TV3's Inside New Zealand.

And this blurry line he's describing between documentary and reality TV, it's something we're definitely going to keep running into.

Yeah.

This is pre-TV3.

TV3 came along in 89.

So before then...

This is John McDonald.

He's a freelance producer now, but spent decades as the head of entertainment production at TV3, heading shows like Dancing with the Stars and New Zealand's Next Top Model.

I can't really speak for anybody, you know, other than myself and some of the people that I've worked with.

You know, my producer of Top Model for the first two seasons was a woman called Anna Lynch.

Maybe I was in a hole in the ground.

I don't know.

Weren't you working at TV3 when that show was on air?

Oh, man.

I don't know whether I'm pushing you into a corner here, but you feel free to take the fifth on this.

But is there also a strong call for advertisers to think about why they would use Netflix over, say, TV3 or TVNZ? Because all of that money would go offshore, wouldn't it? I mean, did Netflix pay any company tax in New Zealand? They'd obviously pay GST.

So that money would just...

Yes,

But Rod Dixon, one of our Olympians, he was a runner, he was doing a documentary on it.

And I was at TV3 at the time, and he interviewed me beforehand.

And I'm just, yeah, you know, feeling

good, you know, all this kind of stuff.

And I said, was it? Because I don't know.

And he said, this is what will happen.

And TV3 hadn't started yet.

And he said, this is what will happen.