33 Great Aussie and Kiwi Shows You Can Stream in the U.S.
This list was originally published on July 1, 2021. It has been updated to include additional shows.
From Nicole Kidman to Lucy Lawless, from Taika Waititi to the brothers Hemsworth, Hollywood has long benefited from the wealth of talent coming out of the antipodes. But while most Americans would be able to name at least enough Australian and/or Kiwi actors to fill an Australian rules football team (roster space: 22), it took the advent of the peak streaming era for our access to antipodean pop culture itself to open up.
No longer do those of us stuck in non-Oceanic climes have to be grateful for crumbs like “select story lines from daytime soap Neighbours in limited coastal markets” or “two brief seasons of Flight of the Conchords airing for the even more limited market of ‘people with pricey HBO subscriptions.’” The rise of streaming — and especially of niche streamers like Acorn TV, Sundance Now, and Freevee (RIP) — opened up the real estate for more Australian and Kiwi originals. And as shows like Dance Academy, Wentworth, and Rake were followed by even more ambitious fare like Please Like Me, No Activity, and Creamerie, an audience with an appetite for all things Aussie/Kiwi was established.
By 2021, when I put together the first version of this list, North American streamers were in the midst of such an obvious boom that in curating the list, I left as many titles off as I ended up including. But the boom of 2021 was just a fizzle compared to what’s come down the pipe since. Not only has this list expanded from 20 titles to 33, but so too has the number of really solid recommendations I’ve decided to leave off — six of the eight titles from the previous paragraph included!
The “why” behind what I’ve excluded is largely arbitrary: At some point, you just have to set the Roku controller down. (Though in the case of Please Like Me, that’s just because it’s no longer available on any North American subscription service.) But for the most part, I’ve aimed to make this list a combination of hidden gems and big hits; brand-new buzzy titles and cult classics; and personal favorites and crowd-pleasers.
In general, there is also a bias on this list toward series that are streaming anywhere but Netflix. No shade! It’s just that Netflix has the deepest bench of titles across all streamers, and it makes it easy to search for, say, “Australian TV Shows,” and come back with 30 perfectly reasonable options. Basically, Netflix renders the most basic purpose of this list redundant. Still, the OG streamer plays host to enough heavy hitters (Fisk!) that it’s not entirely absent.
Whether you’re looking to the other side of the globe for your next gritty crime drama, a sexy summer romp, or a bit of clean fun for the whole family, this list’s got you covered. (And when The Office: Australia and Return to Paradise make it from Australia to North America, I’ll be back with another update …)
Australia
The Artful Dodger (Hulu)
➽ Historical literary adaptation/surgical drama
The Artful Dodger plays like a fever dream. Ostensibly a spinoff (?) of the famed Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist (??), the 1850s-set series plays mainly as a grisly Victorian-era medical drama, complete with carnival barker–like surgical-theater performances. There’s also the inherent class tensions between Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Dodger, a low-class surgical savant who made his name in the Navy and now works at the hospital for nothing more than room, board, and tips, and Dr. Rainsford Sneed (Nicholas Burton), a middling surgical talent but the hospital’s educated upper-class star, ready to be anointed head surgeon the moment their alcoholic boss keels over dead.
But while the hospital is the primary narrative engine for both Dodger’s personal ambitions and the parallel ambitions reflected in Dodger’s star-crossed romantic foil, Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), The Artful Dodger is still an Oliver Twist spinoff. So naturally, we also need to welcome in David Thewlis as the infamous Fagin, absconded to Australia to track down Dodger and embroil him in another heist scheme.
It’s so much! And it’s also so much fun. Brodie-Sangster is utterly dashing, Mitchell is a force of will, and Thewlis is just chomping his way through every scene. I don’t care that this show was presented as a one-off miniseries, or that it ended on a neat enough conclusion to call Dodger’s story done. So did Oliver Twist. Give me another half-dozen seasons of The Artful Dodger now, please and thank you.
Black Snow (Acorn TV, Sundance Now)
➽ Crime drama
One of two Travis Fimmel joints on this list, Black Snow is a fairly classic addition to the “cold case” crime-drama canon. Created by Lucas Taylor, the series stars Fimmel as an investigator with a dark personal past who’s senior enough in his department that he gets to choose the cases he takes on, parachuting into communities to help get justice that’s long overdue. In the first season, his chosen case revolves around the mystery of a murdered Black teen from a South Sea Islander community named Isabel Baker, who in 1994 left an ominous message about her coming death locked in the time capsule she and her fellow Breakfast Club–esque detention kids had been tasked to organize. In the tradition of Mystery Road, the answers he digs up are both surprising (who actually dunnit) and utterly expected (racism derived from settler colonialism). I’m ready to follow his next case in the upcoming season two.
➽ Kids/Animated
A favorite of families (and adults!) the world over, Bluey is one of the rare shows — made for kids or otherwise — that might reasonably be called an Instant Classic. Following the mostly domestic adventures of 6-year-old Bluey Heeler*, her little sister, Bingo, and their parents Bandit (David McCormack) and Chilli (Melanie Zanetti), Bluey takes as its central concern the inherent value of imaginative play. From a magical xylophone that renders its targets utterly motionless to a home “surgery” that follows literal cat-and-mouse procedural logic to a cross-cultural camping experience where the language of play transcends every linguistic barrier, Bluey presents its viewers with a world in which no game is too far outside the imaginative bounds. More importantly, it presents a world in which no adult is ever too grown-up to set aside their Grown-Up Worries and join in. Truly: a joy.
*Per series creator Joe Brumm, the identities of the various kid actors are kept secret for their privacy.
Boy Swallows Universe (Netflix)
➽ Bildungsroman/Crime thriller
If you thought the genre mash-up of The Artful Dodger was weird, just wait until you get a look at Boy Swallows Universe. Based on Trent Dalton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name and set in 1980s Brisbane, Boy Swallows Universe is a reality-bending coming-of-age story, mixed with an addiction/crime drama. Auden Ryan, Felix Cameron, and Zac Burgess star as the story’s protagonist, Eli Bell, at various ages, while Lee Tiger Halley plays Eli’s selectively mute older brother, Gus, who communicates with Eli through silent, visually magical means. Meanwhile, the boys’ mom Frances (Phoebe Tonkin) is slipping in and out of serious addiction, their stepdad Lyle (Travis Fimmel) is getting cozy with the wrong kind of criminals, and their dad Robert (Simon Baker) is hardly present enough to make the difference he should. Add in Eli’s burgeoning passion for investigative journalism — spurred in part by his crush on a young hotshot reporter played by Sophie Wilde — and those two wildly different tonal registers tangle up into something spiky and compelling. Not pleasant, necessarily! Boy Swallows Universe shares with Deadloch (see below) a taste for the artfully grisly.
Class of ’07 (Prime Video)
➽End-of-the-world comedy
What would you do if you were stranded in the middle of an oceanic apocalypse with all your high-school frenemies, with no hope of reaching help from any direction? What about all of that, but also it’s the day after you stood in front of all those former classmates at your high-school reunion and told them you’d be happy not to see any of them again for the next ten years?
That’s the existential premise of the 2023 comedy Class of ’07, which stars Emily Browning, Megan Smart, Caitlin Stasey, Claire Lovering, and Sarah Krndija (among others) as the possibly sole survivors of a global catastrophe that renders their posh all-girls high school a desert island overnight. It’s Romy and Michele meets Yellowjackets meets The Wilds, tuned to the key of millennial nostalgia.
Colin From Accounts (Paramount+)
➽ Cringe romantic comedy
Cross-generational romantic comedy Colin From Accounts is the one Australian import apart from Bluey that your straitlaced boss, cool teen nibling, and old aunt are all likely to have heard of. To which I say, thanks, Evil, for sending more eyes to Paramount+!
Created by and starring real-life married couple Patrick Brammall (of pre-streaming Aussie comedy faves Wilfred and No Activity, and also the aforementioned Evil) and Harriet Dyer (of No Activity, American Auto, and The InBetween), Colin From Accounts is a cringe-comedy crucible. It follows the uneven evolution of a possibly ill-advised romance between Gen-X microbrewery owner Gordon (Brammall) and millennial premed student Ashley (Dyer) after she whimsically flashes him on her way to class in the opening moments of the pilot. This action renders Gordon so distracted that he hits and paralyzes a small terrier dog with his car, at which point the two become stuck with each other — and an adorable paralyzed terrier. Unafraid to delve into the cringiest corners of the two leads’ neuroses, the series is packed to the brim with joke setups so anxiety-inducing you’d be forgiven for wanting to crawl out of your skin. (No spoilers, but let’s just say the series *starts* with a doggie/human-poop-scoop mix-up …). But if American audiences are anything to go by, cringe is in. So here’s hoping for season three!
Deadloch (Prime Video)
➽ Feminist noir (serial-killer) comedy
Deadloch, the Tasmania-set comedic serial-killer noir created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan that took certain corners of the internet by storm when it hit Prime Video in late 2023, is graphic — and I mean that in every sense of the word. Full-frontal-nudity graphic — both men and women, both dead and alive — and also “wow, that’s a lot of grisly [redacted] to see so [redacted] across the [redacted]” graphic.
But those explicit depictions underscore the many points McCartney and McLennan are trying to make about how misogyny putrefies society. It also lets them highlight — in particular through tinderbox leads Dulcie (Kate Box) and Eddie (Madeleine Sami), Deadloch’s own Odd Couple detectives — that women, human as they are, are far from paragons of wisdom or virtue. This doesn’t always make for a comfortable watch. But what’s grating at the start of Dulcie and Eddie’s investigation into who’s killing and cutting the tongues out of all the men in their increasingly woke feminist town comes together satisfyingly by the end. Thank goodness a second season is on its way.
Fisk (Netflix)
➽ Estate- and probate-law workplace comedy
You know you’ve found a great comedy when you reach the end of your first binge and immediately want to start it over again. Such is the experience with Fisk, the estate-law-focused workplace comedy created by Kitty Flanagan and Vincent Sheehan that stars Flanagan as Helen Tudor-Fisk, a middle-age contract attorney who teeters socially between awkwardly chatty and naïvely brusque.
Recently divorced (under slightly mortifying circumstances), Helen has just moved back to her hometown of Melbourne. There, her work history of “no court experience” and “not really a people person” gets her brown-loafered foot through exactly one door: Gruber & Gruber Solicitors, a small family firm that specializes in wills and probate and employs precisely three people — Gruber siblings and firm partners Ray (Marty Sheargold) and Roz (Julia Zemiro), and George (Aaron Chen), their Gen-Z probate clark and self-appointed “webmaster.”
The inherent absurdity of the bureaucracy that accompanies death goes a long way toward making Fisk stand out from the crowd. But as is true in any good workplace sitcom, what really makes Fisk tick is the density of its jokes and the comedic chemistry of its ensemble. Flanagan, Zemiro, Sheargold, and Chen are such natural scene partners that they can all four play the straight man and still end up with the funniest thing you’ve seen in ages. I’m just desperately waiting for season three (airing this October in Australia) to hit American Netflix.
Jack Irish (Acorn TV)
➽ Noir/thriller
One of those titles you’ve probably seen floating around in the past decade with the qualifier “critically acclaimed,” Jack Irish — both in its original film incarnation and in its latter-day TV one — is a perennial hard-boiled favorite. Adapted from Peter Temple’s Jack Irish novels and starring Guy Pearce as the titular ex-lawyer turned private investigator/debt collector, the series revels in sending the hard-knock Irish tumbling through the darker corners and meaner alleyways of modern-day Melbourne in pursuit of conspiracies, cons, and downright bad dudes. A “pretty blokey show,” to hear one professional Irish devotee describe it, Jack Irish might not act like it’s interested in being everyone’s cup of tea (or rather, pint of the prince of Prussia’s finest), but the rough-and-tumble contemporary-noir genre has fans in every corner. If you count yourself among them, maybe give Jack Irish a look.
Kath & Kim (Netflix)
➽ Iconic mother-daughter sitcom
Rejoice, ye fans of cult comedic duos (Trixie Mattel and Katya included!): Jane Turner and Gina Riley’s beloved Y2K-era sitcom, which ran for four seasons from 2002 to 2007 and included two stand-alone film outings (2005’s Da Kath & Kim Code and 2012’s Kath & Kimderella), is currently available on Netflix in its entirety. A suburban satire filmed with a mockumentary cinéma vérité lens—think This is Spinal Tap meets mall-walking Melbourne—Kath & Kim stars Turner as Kath Day-Knight, a brassy, fitness-loving empty nester, and Riley as Kim Craig, Kath’s romantically flighty, self-obsessed adult daughter. Broad, awkward, and goofy to the extreme, Kath & Kim is the ultimate slice (pun intended) of Australian television history. As a bonus: Already the ne plus ultra of mother-daughter cringe comedy, Kath & Kim manages nevertheless to up the absurdist ante with the fact that Turner and Craig are just one year apart in age — a surreal detail echoed by one of today’s own cringe cult comedies, PEN15. It’s the circle of (satiric) life!
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries/Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries (Acorn TV)
➽ Cozy period mysteries
Regular viewers of PBS will already be familiar with Essie Davis’s delicious portrayal of Miss Phryne Fisher, lady detective, but for everyone who hasn’t spent the last decade watching Masterpiece Mystery!, take this recommendation for the clanging siren it is: Run, don’t walk, to your nearest Acorn TV subscription, as the 1920s-set Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is the proverbial bee’s knees. What’s more, its 1960s-set spinoff, Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, which launched its second season earlier this month and stars a sparky Geraldine Hakewill as Peregrine Fisher, Phryne’s long-lost niece, is the cat’s pajamas. More than the cat’s pajamas, it’s hot. If Phryne always found a way to play the sex-positive femme fatale in 1929 Melbourne, the Melbourne Peregrine lands in in the 1960s is downright horny. Match the series’ many eclectic murders up with two solid supporting casts, some luscious costuming, a couple of smo(u)ldering hot romances, and this this cheerfully sexy, unapologetically feminist vibe, and you’ve honestly got the perfect double-feature summer binge.
Mystery Road/Mystery Road: Origin (Acorn TV)
➽ Noir mystery
Adapted from a 2013 film of the same name, Mystery Road is, aside from being a taut longform mystery anchored by a handful of truly exceptional performances, one of the most visually striking television series to be made anywhere in the last few years. Starring Aaron Pedersen as Indigenous Australian Detective Jay Swan, the series uses desolate rural crimes — at a cattle station on disputed land in the outback in the first season, in the mangroves and on a coastal archaeological dig site in the second — to investigate the tensions, both generational and interpersonal, between white beneficiaries of settler colonialism and the descendants of the Aboriginal communities that same settler colonialism exploited and dispossessed. It is heavy stuff, but writers Michaeley O’Brien, Steven McGregor, Kodie Bedford and Tim Lee and Indigenous Australian directors Rachel Perkins (series one) and Warwick Thornton and Wayne Blair (series two) handle each story with expert precision, while Pedersen ties it all together onscreen.
It wasn’t a surprise, then, when the ABC announced a Jay Swan–focused prequel series, Mystery Road: Origin. Set in 1999, Origin stars Mark Coles Smith as a young Jay Swan, recently promoted to detective and just returned to his hometown, where on top of the regular racism, wealth gaps, and general socioeconomic iniquities imposed on the community by generations of settler colonialism, Jay also has to contend with the complex ties he has to his alcoholic rodeo-king dad (Kelton Pell), his wayward brother Sputty (Clarence Ryan), and his childhood crush Mary (Tuuli Narkle). Fresh cast aside, the setting is as harsh and sweeping as anything in Mystery Road original flavor, and the mystery itself as complex and culturally prickly.
Neighbours (Prime Video)
➽ Daytime soap opera
U.S. supernatural soap Passions may have given a start to a young Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Canadian teen soap Degrassi introduced the world to Drake, but Australian favorite Neighbours set the stage for (among others) Natalie Imbruglia, Kylie Minogue, Margot Robbie, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Jesse Spencer, Alan Dale, and both of the more famous Hemsworth bros. And when it was revived as a streaming joint by Freevee in 2023, The O.C.’s Mischa Barton joined that big-name list, bringing a dose of mid-aughts American soapiness to Ramsay Street with her.
Playing for Keeps (Sundance Now)
➽Soapy sports drama
Not to be confused with the 2012 Gerard Butler movie of the same name, Sundance Now’s Playing for Keeps is a soapy drama ostensibly about the WAGS (wives and girlfriends) attached to a professional Australian rules football team in Melbourne that ends up being so much more than it seems. Well, okay — with the very Desperate Housewives promise its trailer makes of Sex! Lies! And Scandal!, it is, in many ways, exactly what it seems. But while sex, lies, and scandal absolutely abound, the show’s decision to really anchor the viewer in the Everywoman perspective of Cecelia Peters’ new-to-the-team Paige Dunkley adds a layer of disarming self-awareness that makes humanizing the rest of the series’ more classically glamorous WAGS much easier than it might otherwise have been. When the end of the first episode takes a sharp pivot and someone winds up dead, that same disarmament works further in the show’s favor — what might have felt like tonal whiplash without Paige having already thoroughly rejiggered our expectations instead feels just like one more tick on the Yes, please, next episode checklist. All that said, a word of warning: While season two ends on a massive twist of a cliffhanger, the series itself has been officially canceled. So maybe just watch through that season’s villain getting their comeuppance, then shut it down. Or don’t! It is 2021, after all; no cancellation ever really means never.
Rake (Netflix)
➽ Political satire/legal dramedy
A big enough success in its native Australia to have inspired a (short-lived) American remake, Rake arguably turned the tides in scripted Australian television from satire (see Kath & Kim above) to more hybrid/serious fare. Not that it’s really all that serious: The story of a whip-smart, self-destructive barrister who prefers to defend the most hopeless, most obviously guilty clients — loosely based on the real life of Sydney’s own Charles Waterstreet, who co-created the series — Rake delights in skewering every bloated part of the Australian legal scene it can. While different fans might point to any number of things as reasons for the show’s critical success, everyone will agree that star Richard Roxborough’s incendiary charisma is top among them. That said, if Roxborough himself isn’t a big enough name to draw you in, consider this: Having debuted in 2010 and run for eight long seasons, the series also has the distinction of playing host to a real rogue’s gallery of familiar Australian names, including John Noble, Rachel Griffiths, Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill, Toni Collette, Elizabeth Debicki and Cate Blanchett. Not a bad grab for your next Netflix binge.
Total Control (Sundance Now)
➽ Political thriller
Co-starring Deborah Mailman and Rachel Griffiths, Total Control is at once a quietly powerful portrait of one Indigenous Aboriginal woman’s fight to represent both her individual soul and her people’s country and a wild political thrill ride pitting Mailman’s virtuous David against Griffiths’s corrupt Goliath. Given that this series shares much of its creative DNA with Mystery Road, it’s unsurprising that it ends up being so well balanced. But where Mystery Road thrives on the desolate beauty of Australia’s forgotten corners, Total Control finds its energy in the friction that naturally exists between the Indigenous communities that Mailman, as first-term Senator Alex Irving, sets out to fight for, and the faceless Canberra political machine that Griffiths, as the scheming Prime Minister Rachel Anderson, does her best to paint a convincing shade of neo-feminist. In its short first-season run, the series succeeds in weaving a remarkable number of ideas together, the bad guys most deserving of comeuppance getting at least something in the ballpark of justice, but potential fans will still be gratified to know that a second season is officially on its way.
Totally Completely Fine (AMC+)
➽ Suicide-prevention dramedy
Avuncular elders bequeathing their messy young female relatives a large property attached to an even larger community responsibility is a surprising trend to see come out of this list! (See Good Grief below.) But if that’s what it takes to bring us the intensity and reward of Gretel Vella’s Totally Completely Fine, which stars Thomasin McKenzie as Vivian Cunningham, a 20-something dipping in and out of crisis who inherits her grandpa’s cliffside home — and the responsibility of talking would-be suicides off said cliffside, with it — then that’s a trend I welcome. Informed by the societal mental-health crisis Vella saw rising during the early days of the pandemic, Totally Completely Fine is hard and surprising in equal measure. McKenzie’s Vivian is prickly, and her arc isn’t smooth, but the six episodes we’re given to watch both blossom are worth the time.
Upright (Sundance Now)
➽ Bleak comedy
One of the odder Odd Couple buddy comedies to come out in recent memory, musician Tim Minchin’s Upright is a slick exercise in artistic vision. Minchin’s strung-out, laughably named Lucky Flynn struggles to get a rickety old upright piano from one side of Australia to the other for reasons that remain unclear until the very last. His co-lead is the impossibly charming Milly Alcock, whose prickly teen runaway, Meg, ropes Lucky into taking her along after he accidentally runs her off the road and breaks her arm. If all this sounds bleaker than a comedy ought to be, you’re not wrong — it can be a lot! But Minchin and Alcock are an electric duo, their bristling anti-chemistry transmuting their characters’ respective funks from mostly unwatchable to genuinely compelling. Whether they reach their final destination — and what they do if and when they get there — that’s for you to find out.
Wolf Like Me (Peacock)
➽ Family grief/werewolf drama (with a rom-com flourish)
Wolf Like Me is so tonally weird. Helmed by stars Josh Gad and Isla Fisher, two very funny people playing two very intense and wrecked characters, the semi-autobiographical series created by Australian writer Abe Forsythe (Little Monsters) follows a budding second-chance romance in Adelaide that blooms after advice columnist Mary (Fisher) rams her ute into the sedan of widower dad Gary (Gad) and his preteen daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue). Why is the show so bizarre? For one, Fisher, who grew up in Perth, is doing an American accent. For another, Adelaide houses are notoriously basement-free — a nonnegotiable domestic feature Gary and Mary will need if they ever move in together as at least one of them, as the show’s title heavily implies, really is a secret werewolf.
That supernatural twist was embargoed during the season-one run of the series, but with a very literal (were)wolfishness hanging over the next stage of the couple’s romance in season two, I think it’s better to just be open about it. It’s just a weird little show! But Gad and Fisher are great in it, and their innate American outsider-hood gives Forsythe the door to make the Australia-ness of the setting — both suburban and wild — shine.
New Zealand
The Brokenwood Mysteries (Acorn TV)
➽ “Blue Skies” police procedural
One of the longer-lived series on this list, New Zealand’s The Brokenwood Mysteries is another police procedural that feels like a throwback to USA Network’s “blue skies” era. Starring Neill Rea as the country music-loving Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Shepherd and Fern Sutherland as his ambitious, type-A second-in-command, Detective Kristin Sims, the series is a classic in the “unconventional outsider detective moves to a quaint country town; many murders ensue” canon. It’s not particularly challenging, and the dialogue can leave something to be desired, but in a time when gritty reigns supreme, it can be a relief to know there’s still at least one new comfortable procedural binge a click away.
Good Grief (AMC+)
➽ Family funeral-home workplace comedy
The first iteration of this list included a show called The Casketeers, a “tastefully lighthearted” unscripted docuseries about the general goings-on of a modern-day working funeral home and the specific grief practices of Māori, Samoan, and Tongan communities.
Well, that show is no longer streaming on North American Netflix. But where the true-to-life stories of The Casketeers have disappeared off our screens, an equally tasteful but totally fictional take on the same subject has popped up over on AMC+: Good Grief, a two-hander workplace comedy written by and starring Eve and Grace Palmer as Ellie and Gwen, two very different sisters who inherit their grandfather’s small-town funeral home and have to learn to work together to both fix their lives and honor the community he served.
Note: American audiences might recognize the Palmer sisters from Fox’s procedural sitcom, Animal Control — which, to be clear, only Grace stars in. But the sisters’ incredible family and comedic resemblance is so stark that they’ve made it a running gag in their fictional funeral home. Work with what you’ve got!
Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee (YouTube)
➽ Dropout-esque panel game show
Now this one is cheating a bit, because technically the extraordinarily silly Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee isn’t yet available on any North American streamers. Also technically, it’s no longer the New Zealand production it started out as, but rather an Australian one.
That said, the ABC’s official YouTube channel has posted a number of extended clips of the New Zealander–hosted panel game show, and few things have made me absolutely hoot with delight in recent months than the Dropout-esque sneakiness of New Zealand comedian Guy Montgomery’s hosting style mixed with the understated trickster awkwardness of Guy’s “loyal assistant,” Australian comedian Aaron Chen (whose whole vibe is also part of what makes Fisk such a banger). Who cares if this isn’t *technically* streaming yet on Peacock or whatever. Surf to YouTube and get on the Guy Mont-Spelling Bee train before all your friends!
Mean Mums (Peacock)
➽ Parenting comedy
The absolute promotional void Peacock has given Mean Mums, the Morgana O’Reilly–starring sitcom from writer Amanda Alison that’s still actively in production in New Zealand, is baffling. A perfectly fun satire of private-school-mum culture in the 21st century — think Big Little Lies meets Kimmy Schmidt, as envisioned by Jemaine Clement — Mean Mums has mastered the art of sending up the current parenting moment’s goofiest obsessions without tipping into outright maliciousness. Key to this success? Using O’Reilly’s new-to-the-school Jess, who joins the junior campus’ fundraising team as a way to make new friends while supporting her son, as their primary tool. For example, the kid of one of the mums in the group, Heather (Anna Jullienne), is named Cinnamon, while the kid of the other, Hine (Aroha Rawson), is named Braxton Hicks. Elsewhere in the school? A Zinzan, a Zee-Kai, a Karma, and, if Heather’s plan to steer a tractable expectant mum away from taking the name Cinnamon for her own goes to plan, a Jessterday, in honor of Jess’s heroic Field Day Mum’s Run. (“It’s totally unique!”) Dry and broad at the same time, Mean Mums is perfect for anyone waiting for the next season of Netflix’s Workin’ Moms, or for the premiere of ABC’s Abbott Elementary.
My Life Is Murder (Acorn TV))
➽ Private-detective comedy
Technically an Australian series during its first season, Lucy Lawless’s private-detective joint, My Life is Murder, moved from Melbourne to Auckland in season two. Featuring Lawless as retired police detective/bread-baking aficionado Alexa Crowe, Ebony Vagulans as her data analyst–assistant, Madison, and Bernard Curry as her former colleague, DI Kieran Hussey, the series follows Crowe as she does what any self-respecting retired detective with a quirky private obsession starring in a “blue skies” era USA Network procedural must: She lets herself get lured back into the game by the mystery of a rooftop murder and the promise of all expenses paid. A cat also features, as does Lawless speaking some pretty impressive German (her high-end dough fabricator, it’s very fussy), but the biggest draw is obviously the breezy, grit-free satisfaction of the cases, themselves.
Nothing Much to Do (YouTube)
➽ Indie web series
Back before streaming made “television” and “web series” all but synonymous concepts, indie filmmakers were using YouTube to test the limits of what web-first, fan-engaged serialized storytelling could be. Reimaginings of classic literature, not surprisingly, were big — public domain, baby! — but while every creator managed to bring something new and fun to the vlogging table, few were more fun to watch than Nothing Much to Do, a teen movie take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing from New Zealand feminist film collective the Candle Wasters. The Wellington-set Nothing Much to Do didn’t just let viewers follow Beatrice and Benedick’s hilariously infuriating enemies-to-lovers journey in real time. It also made room for the tenderness between Hero and Claudio as well as Pedro and Balthazar blossom in a way that even a Shakespeare-length stage play can’t. It serves as a charming artifact of a brief, fruitful moment in the history of both YouTube and television, and a time capsule of the daily life of Wellington teens in the mid-2010s.
Taskmaster: New Zealand (YouTube)
➽Absurdist competition series
If you spent almost any time at all online these past few years, you’ve almost certainly seen a widespread transatlantic devotion to Alex Horne’s BAFTA Award–winning absurdist competition series, Taskmaster. Ostensibly just one more entry in Britain’s long panel-show tradition, Taskmaster follows many of that genre’s most established traditions — take a handful of (mostly) comedians, make them engage in increasingly silly banter in front of a live studio audience — but with an absolutely genius, utterly pointless twist: Everything that happens in the studio happens after the competitors have spent months completing a series of tasks that range from the wildly mundane (“Make this block of ice disappear fastest”) to the truly bizarre (“Make the best nesting-doll tasting menu”). To win the season, each competitor must either execute their tasks with precision or come up with funny enough reasons to convince the Taskmaster — a power-happy, capricious man played in the British original by comedian Greg Davies — why they should get points regardless.
As a cultural export, Taskmaster has generally done better with American audiences in its OG form (the less said about Comedy Central’s bafflingly truncated 2018 adaptation, the better), but for anyone who has, understandably, already burned through the 17 (!) series available through the official Taskmaster YouTube channel, we’re here to recommend the early seasons of Taskmaster: New Zealand and Taskmaster: Australia, both of which make for a more than satisfying Davies-and-Horne chaser. Starring in New Zealand Jeremy Wells as the Taskmaster and comedian Paul Williams as his assistant and in Australia Tom Gleeson as the Taskmaster and Tom Cashman as his assistant, the antipodean spinoffs feature all kinds of comedians found elsewhere on this list, including Madeleine Sami, Aaron Chen, Rhys Nicholson, Nina Oyama, Josh Thomson, and Bubbah, and make an excellent case for Taskmaster as a globe-spanning franchise.
Under the Vines (Acorn TV)
➽ Hallmark-esque romantic vineyard drama
Fans of Sweet Magnolias, Cedar Cove, The Durrells in Corfu, and From Scratch, this one’s for you. Starring Rebecca Gibney and Charles Edwards as a pair of “city slicker” stepcousins — him a lawyer from the U.K., her a socialite from Australia — who suddenly find themselves co-inheritors of a rural New Zealand vineyard, Under the Vines is a straight-down-the-middle romantic drama. To keep Oakley Wines afloat, Daisy (Gibney) and Lewis (Edwards) not only have to set aside their differences long enough to develop a sustainable business plan, but they have to learn how to participate in the hard physical labor of actually cultivating and harvesting the grape crop. Along the way, they create a “found family” with their employees and neighbors and fall in love with the beauty of the Central Otago countryside — and also, possibly, each other. Workplace disputes, industry drama, and, in season three, a potential inheritance spoiler in the shape of Mark Mitchinson all shake up their world as the series goes on, but warmth and good vibes are the ultimate name of the game.
Wellington Paranormal (Acorn TV)
➽ Supernatural comedy
Anyone who’s seen the original What We Do in the Shadows, the New Zealand mockumentary film that the beloved FX series spun off from, will already be familiar with Wellington Paranormal’s broad conceit. Which is, specifically, to mine surreal comedy from normie cops coming into contact with various supernatural creatures in various banal settings. In What We Do in the Shadows (the film), those normie cops were the remarkably dense — but ever game! — officers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O’Leary), and it was a pack of blood-drenched vampires/sloppy roommates they crossed paths with. In Wellington Paranormal, Minogue and O’Leary are still on the case, but now it’s not just vampires haunting their beat — it’s also demonic possessions, ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. While the pair acquit themselves well enough in their sudden starring turn, it’s Maaka Pohatu’s Sergeant Maaka who stands out. The knowing oldhead to their rookie skepticism, Sergeant Maaka lends a dry gravity to the proceedings that brings the show together.
Antipodeans Abroad
Everything’s Gonna Be Okay (Hulu)
➽ Comedy
Airing on Freeform alongside the likes of grown-ish, The Bold Type, and Good Trouble, Australian comedian Josh Thomas’s Everything’s Gonna Be Okay is technically American, but with Thomas on hand both as showrunner and star, and his best friend (and Please Like Me co-star) Thomas Ward co-writing and co-executive producing, it is, in its sensibilities, also not not Australian. So if you can’t manage to shell out for Acorn TV or Sundance Now, or if you really just love Please Like Me and want more Josh Thomas without having to go through the painful experience of rewatching Please Like Me (see above), maybe make Everything’s Gonna Be Okay you first pick from this list.
As a modern family drama, it is among the most real-feeling currently on the air — despite the fact that its premise sees Thomas’s Nicholas entering his half-sisters’ lives when their dad signs over surprise custody to Nicholas before dying of an equally surprising cancer diagnosis he just sort of skipped telling his family anything about. Dark, yes, but executed with such briskness (Dad’s out of the picture by the middle of the first episode) that it’s almost like ripping off a narrative bandaid. What follow are two meandering seasons of Nicholas, Matilda (Kayla Cromer, American television’s first actor with autism to play a character with autism), and Genevieve (Maeve Press) not just getting to build a relationship as siblings for the first time in their lives but getting to grow into the people they’re meant to become. It’s lovely, and awkward, and perfectly Josh Thomas. May it last for years to come.
➽ Piratical romantic comedy
Created by an American and written largely by, yes, also Americans, Our Flag Means Death nevertheless stars one of New Zealand’s most famous exports, Taika Waititi, as the notorious Captain Blackbeard and his frequent Kiwi collaborator Rhys Darby (What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople) as gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet. It also co-stars New Zealand actors David Fane, Madeleine Sami, and Anapela Polataivao, and much of season two was filmed on location in New Zealand. If that’s not pedigree enough to earn an honorary spot on this list, I don’t know what is. Beyond that, what’s there to say that Vulture’s other writers haven’t said before?
➽ Romantic comedy
Created by Kiwi comedians Rose Matafeo (who also stars) and Alice Snedden, Starstruck is pretty much the ideal summer rom-com binge. Smart, sexy, and deftly paced, the London-set series tells the star-crossed story of two would-be lovers, Matafeo’s Jessie and Nikesh Patel’s Tom. The first season takes course of one calendar year. They hook up, they miscommunicate, they overcorrect, then can’t connect — they act, in other words, like any other pair of modern lovers. Only in Starstruck, Jessie is a “little rat nobody” and Tom is an A-list famous actor. This obviously adds some extra friction to their maybe-kinda-someday relationship, but Matafeo and Snedden wisely balance the disparity in Jessie and Tom’s public profiles by giving Jessie a complete lack of knowledge about Tom’s career before they met and an equally complete lack of interest in any of the trappings of Tom’s fame after they hook up.
Things naturally evolve as the series progresses through seasons two and three. And while not everyone will be satisfied with where Jessie and Tom end up, there is an earned honesty by which they arrive there. Sweet, brimming with chemistry, and a thousand percent fantasy, Starstruck is a series you’ll want to watch again and again.
The Tourist (Netflix)
➽ Amnesiac noir/thriller/western/romance
A final tonally odd entry for this list, The Tourist could theoretically have fit both here in the “Antipodeans Abroad” section and up above in the “Australia” one. Created and written by brothers Harry and Jack Williams (The Missing), the BBC series’ first season finds star Jamie Dornan stranded and disconnected in the middle of Australia after a freak accident knocks him cold and leaves him with a hard case of amnesia — and no ID in his pocket to even give a hint at his name. Unfortunately for him, whoever he was before was Bad News, and pretty soon he finds himself on the run from one high-octane threat and cartoonishly accented villain after another. Thankfully, in the midst of that seemingly deadly thrill ride, he at least gets to enjoy the natural majesty (and intensity) of the Australian Outback, and also a budding romance with Helen Chambers (Danielle MacDonald), a local law-enforcement officer assigned to his case who gets increasingly embroiled in his high-stakes identity crisis.
There are enough answers to be had by the end of season one that the pair are then able to jet off to Ireland to investigate further (Dornan is on the record saying the relocation was a factor in his excitement to sign on for another season), but don’t expect an entirely happy ending after that homecoming. No word yet on whether a third season is in the works, but if the BBC wants it, the Williams brothers left a heck of a open door for Dornan and MacDonald to walk through.
Related