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The Spinoff
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: Nothing unites the masses like a deeply embarrassing man
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. 'Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.' This tweet from 2019 plays out in my head every time someone, anyone, becomes the main character of the day in New Zealand. Twitter in 2019 moved fast, and the main character from Monday, where tens of thousands of people were dunking on them, could very well be forgotten by Wednesday. This week, Ray Chung proved that in New Zealand, if you're embarrassing enough you could be the main character for a whole lot longer. If you aren't across the Chung train wreck, congratulations and stay blessed. If you are, you may have clocked that he managed to embarrass himself every step of the way. And nothing unites the masses like a deeply embarrassing man. There was the first rumour, sure. Embarrassing to fall for a schoolyard rumour when you're seven decades into life but not the greatest sin in the world. Then the refusal to apologise. Then the blaming of other councillors and media for quoting his own words in public. Then the being owned by would-be ally Sean Plunket live on air. Then the shambles campaign event. This man just cannot stop being embarrassing. Ray Chung is Drake in the Drake vs Kendrick beef. Except there's no Kendrick. Or maybe Kendrick is the semblance of common sense. Ray Chung is Drake, and I have never gladly thought about Drake in my life. Here's hoping for a new main character next week, for everyone's sake. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week A rare and compelling example of Main Character syndrome lasting a whole week. Feedback of the week 'I wish they'd de-extinct Jaffas, Snifters and Tangy Fruits instead. The biodiversity of the cinema snack bar has been severely depleted in recent years and introduced species like M&Ms have multiplied out of control. How are we to enjoy Sir Peter's next film (if he ever makes one, he seems to have gone off it a bit as of late) without the proper sweeties to complement it?' 'I once lived on an island which had a population of eight. Things got out of hand in the birthday celebration department and individual inhabitants had to be restricted to one celebration per annum.'
The Spinoff
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: I can't stop thinking about this ad
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. It's either a sign I'm scraping the bottom of the vibes barrel or a sign that I'm choosing to find joy in unexpected places but last weekend I found myself utterly captivated, impressed and moved(?!) by a billboard. To be clear, I have high standards for creative consumerism. I hate that we all just have to accept we'll be surrounded by ads all the time, and therefore feel personally insulted when it feels like that privilege – the privilege corporations have in demanding our attention – is taken for granted. When I see a grotesque and lazy Grimace ad, I will complain about it. Yesterday I saw someone opt, at the last minute, to wait for another bus because their one had the garish police wrap on it. I applauded that stranger. Nothing signals a recession like advertising agencies phoning it in or pitching (likely out of necessity) the most low-effort campaigns imaginable. Digital billboards mean I see six meh ads at the traffic lights instead of one. My expectations for some creative flair on a sign are nil. And then last week, as I waited at the Newton Road offramp lights, I saw this: That's it. Just an ad for a medicinal cannabis clinic. I have no need for medicinal cannabis and won't be buying any now but I laughed out loud when I saw this and then yelled 'good ad!' in the car like a child. It's a grabby billboard that takes a quietly understood visual and makes a point with it. And it looks cool. Technically the campaign is about destigmatising cannabis use for medicinal purposes but ultimately it's an ad and an effective one at that. But what moved me was the real-life presence of it. It's tangible and has to have been man-made. If I have to look at a big ad, it's mildly comforting to know that someone actually put it there. People all over the world still talk about the New Zealand ads for Kill Bill from 20 years ago. AI is unavoidable at this point, and so many creative outputs (read: ads but also art, music, literature) feel either written by AI, designed with AI or at least deployed with little human touch. Giant screens that can be edited with the push of a button are cost-effective but never make me think about real people – even though there are very real people putting ads out in the world. I looked at those giant Chucks and wondered how they were made, what they were made of, how they were transported and how they were installed. For the first time in years I saw an ad and immediately thought fondly of the real human effort behind it. Is that inspiring or depressing? I'm still not sure. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Outrageous Week's wonderful opener, The birth of the Wests: How Outrageous Fortune came to be by Tara Ward Hayden Donnell's open letter to Jacinda Ardern on open letters to Jacinda Ardern Local Liam Rātana returns to the far north to visit the country's new supreme cafe and sees a half-frozen pie It's once again time to ignore our crumbling infrastructure and pass the rates bills on to the next generation. Hayden Donnell on things that make people mad Auckland councillor Julie Fairey has always advocated for improved road safety – then she got hit by a car Feedback of the week 'Could we all please collectively take a moment to pause and appreciate the guy rocking the marijuana shirt in the back row of the fourth/bottom photo?' On What it's like to go blind at 25 'Bloody wonderful article, Oscar. My dads blind- started in his 30's, like his mum. It's always been far away future for me until it wasn't – on the cusp on 30 and suddenly I can't see shit. Weird, lonely experience – thanks for making it less so.'
The Spinoff
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Twenty years on, Outrageous Fortune remains as relevant as ever
Tara Ward reflects on an Outrageous week on The Spinoff. On 12 July, 2005, Outrageous Fortune burst onto our screens and transformed the landscape of New Zealand television. Created by Rachel Lang and James Griffin, the big, bold comedy-drama ran for six award-winning seasons and 108 episodes following the unpredictable exploits of the Wests, a family of career criminals living in West Auckland. It wasn't easy for the Wests to go straight, and Outrageous captured the attention and affection of New Zealanders in a way that no local scripted series had before. The Spinoff spent this week celebrating the 20th anniversary of Outrageous Fortune, and it's been a delightful trip down TV memory lane. We began on Monday with my cover story about how the Wests were born, and how the show was inspired by a news report that writer Rachel Lang heard in the shower one morning in 2003. I'd always thought Outrageous Fortune was an instant success, but it turns out New Zealand audiences were a tough crowd. It took three seasons before our love affair with Outrageous truly blossomed, and the show proved critics wrong over and over again. Across six dramatic seasons, Outrageous burrowed into our national consciousness in a variety of unexpected and colourful ways. I loved Alex Casey's deep dive into the show's spectacular use of swearing, while Liam Rātana took us on a thoughtful trip through Outrageous Fortune's most defining and memorable moments. Gareth Shute explored how the show championed a variety of iconic, sometimes forgotten New Zealand music, and Emma Gleason unpacked the unique style of our favourite Westies in all their leather and leopard-print glory. Tomorrow, actor Siobhan Marshall (who played Pascalle West) ends the week by taking us through her life in television. The legacy of Outrageous Fortune runs deep – even now, it's hard to see someone wearing leopard print without thinking of Cheryl West (and if you're wondering how obsessed New Zealand was with the show, check out this impressive 2010 entry for a Cheryl-lookalike competition in Ashburton). Outrageous Fortune inspired the award-winning prequel series Westside, and several of the show's cast and crew went on to achieve international success, including Antony Starr (The Boys, Banshee) and Robyn Malcolm, who most recently starred in the BAFTA-nominated After the Party and Netflix global hit drama The Survivors. Rewatching Outrageous Fortune reminded me that aspects of the show remain as relevant today as they were in 2005. 'In our real world, we are all encouraged to think that if we just try hard enough and show initiative, we can all be rich and famous,' Lang and Griffin wrote in their original Outrageous pitch. Twenty years later, everyone from politicians to influencers to the media remind us that we too can be wealthy and successful, if we only try hard enough. Lang was inspired to create Outrageous Fortune after she learned the median income for New Zealand women in 2003 was just over $14,000. The week before I spoke to Lang about that memory, the government rushed through changes to pay equity laws, which will predominantly impact the incomes of working-class women. Two decades may have passed, but some things haven't changed. Outrageous Fortune is a New Zealand television success story, a show filled with our voices, our issues and our humour. It's been a joy to spend a week remembering and celebrating the series. Once you've read all our Outrageous Week pieces, do yourself a favour – take a trip back to 2005 and enjoy a West family reunion this weekend.
The Spinoff
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: The illusion of choice
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. Over the past two years, The Spinoff has published more than 130 entries in our Cost of Being series. We got off to a shaky start, with a number of readers believing that presenting poor people's spending habits was glamourising poverty (bad) and presenting rich people's spending habits was celebrating wealth (even worse). Thankfully, as more and more New Zealanders – and yes, they are all written by real people – shared their financial realities, the real reason for the Cost of Being's popularity has revealed itself. We are all nosy and we are all judgy. What a joy it is to get such a peek into a stranger's life, and then to be able to quietly judge all of their financial decisions. We all make so many decisions every day that it can be equal parts comforting and aspirational to see how others choose differently. And that's the key part: choices. We aren't judging people, we're judging their choices. As if all choices happen in the same reality. This week's Cover Story was Alex Casey's excellent deep-dive into why so many New Zealand women get botox. She spoke to dozens of women who got the treatment and was surprised by how positively they spoke about its effects. But even those who had no regrets and were happy to keeping doing it questioned whether or not this choice they had made was really a choice at all. Did they really want to have a smooth forehead or had societal conditioning, ageism and sexism all combined to give the impression that this just had to be done? The judgement and shame around 'cosmetic' spending is perhaps only rivalled by judgement about alcohol. If you used the Cost of Being as a sample of the population, you'd think New Zealanders are all sober. This is obviously not true but I suspect no one really wants to reveal how much they spend on something as 'non-essential' as alcohol lest they be judged, albeit anonymously, for it. Two days ago, while launching Rotorua's first ever 'beat team' to patrol the city, police minister Mark Mitchell questioned how many of the city's rough sleepers were really homeless. 'From my own experience many of the rough sleepers have got somewhere to go,' he said. 'It's more a lifestyle choice for them.' He's probably right. Many rough sleepers technically have other places they could go. But I wonder if Mitchell has considered what sort of choices are out there if the preferred one is to sleep on the street in the middle of winter. I love reading every Cost of Being entry and, yes, I love to scratch my head at some of the random choices people make. But every once in a while I have to remind myself that no choice is made in a vacuum, and sometimes a 'choice' is just a means of survival. Want to contribute to the Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Feedback of the week 'I'm in my late 30s and feel really similarly about all the points in the article. I'm really fucking vain and I want to look my best, but I also feel really strongly this is yet another patriarchal and capitalist pressure on feminine-coded bodies. I'm also a high school teacher very aware of all the shit that is pouring through the sponsored social media posts peppering my girl students' algorithms and I am rebelling by allowing my age to see seen on my face – side note, my frown lines are hard won and can be weaponized against a class of unruly year 9s or 10s.'
The Spinoff
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Our first reactions to Virgin, Lorde's brand new album
The Spinoff writers share their thoughts on Lorde's fourth album. After returning from her typical four-year hiatus with a series of thrilling pop-ups, including one in the YMCA bathrooms in central Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand pop star Lorde released her fourth album Virgin at midnight last night. With an icy blue cover depicting an X-ray of the singer's own pelvis, the album has brought with it much fan speculation. Will it be even more revealing than her verse in 'girl, so confusing'? Will it be a return to the Melodrama era? And why, oh why, is there a Baby Bash credit? We took a long, hard listen overnight to bring you these findings. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith My virgin Virgin listen was exactly as God intended: alone in my bedroom with the lights off waiting for the midnight release. This is a good nighttime album in the sense that there's an equal number of songs to cry (in a Melodrama way) and dance (in a kind-of Brat way) to – but mostly this is the kind of album that will make you hope the next drug the Act Party makes available over the counter is ketamine. How will Virgin rank in the overall Lorde discography? It's definitely above Solar Power and hitting a sweet spot between Melodrama and Pure Heroine. She's showing off her vocals a bit more, but also really nailing that David Byrne thing of treating lyrical delivery like spoken word that can puncture a melody, rather than flow with it (which kind-of irked me in 'GRWM' and 'Shapeshifter' at first, but now it's very much grown on me). There's a lot of lyrics in this which could work like cryptic Instagram posts ('2009 me'd be so impressed') or something I'd write in my diary if I was crashing out ('if I had virginity, I would have given that too'). And production-wise, Virgin is pretty stripped back, which might be hard for the 'Supercut' and 'Hard Feelings/Loveless' heads. Lorde told us this album would feel like shotgunning a Red Bull and kissing someone you really like, and given the album's runtime and lyrical content, yes, exactly that. 'Clearblue' feels like a new career all-timer for her – a song about wishing you kept the pregnancy test from your last relationship as a memento is exactly what I want to hear from Lorde's ovulation album, and 'your metal detector hits my precious treasure' is my favourite line at the moment. I'll be ready to discuss 'David' after a few more therapy sessions. Mad Chapman In a beautiful and completely coincidental turn of events, I listened to Lorde's new album in full the minute it was released, while riding a city bike around the waterfront in Singapore. I managed two full listens through before dragging my clammy self back to the hotel. My first thought: I wish it was longer. At 34 minutes it ends before it's really begun. But where albums often fall over by not living up to their pre-release singles, Virgin feels like the inverse. 'Favourite Daughter' and 'Current Affairs' are like therapy, and 'David' will likely have the longest shelf life. Lyrically, welcome back to the poet Lorde. Production-wise, I had hoped for a bit more experimenting, though there's a safety (as a listener) in dropping straight back into the melodies and moods we recognise. The final moments of 'David' are thrilling and felt like she was about to dive into something new and then bam, the album is over. Wanted more, enjoyed what I got. P.S. Has Lorde ever made a joke in a song? Because I laughed out loud at the 'Suga Suga' reference. Gabi Lardies Wow not fair guys, I listened to Virgin through headphones in the corner of the lunch-room while being assaulted by the smell of my colleagues' morning eggs. I also encountered some technical difficulties [ads interrupting the flow] due to recently having cancelled my Spotify subscription. I am still trying to figure out an alternative, recommendations welcome. It was during the third song, 'Shapeshifter', that I thought 'ahhhh I know what this is' – bedroom pop, albeit made by one of the biggest pop stars in the world and certainly not lo-fi. These songs, entirely constructed of Ella Yelich-O'Connor's voice and electronic melodies and instruments, are introspective, intimate, nostalgic and sometimes dreamy. Though they're a million miles off Solar Power, they don't hit those party highs of Melodrama. There were moments, particularly in 'Clearblue', when I was reminded of Kody Nielson's Silicon project, and other moments where I thought of Pickle Darling. This is a perfect winter album, something to curl up with on a cold night alone. The lyrics are easy to relate to [it's a break up album too] and it's nice to have some pop for introverts. Alex Casey As Lorde has established herself, this album is probably best enjoyed in a subterranean carpark or a grimy toilet block, alas my first Virgin listen was while doing the damn dishes and making myself a damn omelette before work this morning (as a wise woman once said: vine hanging over the door, dog who comes when I call etc etc etc). Nonetheless, the first three tracks lifted me out of chilly Christchurch suburbia to a place much more thrilling, sweaty, and industrial. She doesn't want us to take our time and bliss out in the sun anymore, but absolutely ping out with urgency under the blue lights. I saw Lorde say in an interview recently that she was put here to make bangers, but that doesn't mean that these songs are all feel-good euphoria. 'Favourite Daughter' is my immediate favourite, a soaring release of a pop song that also fucked me up so insanely hard that I was in tears by the last line. Mum stuff, my god. The whole run through 'Man of Year' to 'Favourite Daughter' to 'Current Affairs' to 'Clearblue' is a powerful Mount Rushmore of knotty unspoken women's shit, confirming suspicions that 'girl so confusing' was just the tip of a very gnarly iceberg. Also the line from 'Suga Suga' – 'Got me lifted, feeling so gifted' – in 'If She Could See Me Now' is the 'Can I kick it? Yeah, I can' from 'Solar Power' and I love it. Not just because I am fuelled almost entirely by early 2000s popular culture references, but because it brought back a vulnerable memory I have long tried to bury. Sometime in 2016, a bunch of us journalist freaks and Lorde, somehow, were on a cursed van ride home from a boozy media schmooze-fest. She had control of the aux cord (rightly so) and I bellowed 'play Baby Bash!!!!' at her in a sav-fuelled fugue state. The look on her face has haunted me ever since, but hearing this lyric on Virgin makes me think that maybe she didn't hate the suggestion as much as I have assumed she did for the last near-decade. That's healing, that's growth… that's Virgin.
