Her Magazine

February/March 2013

Her Magazine is New Zealand’s only women’s business lifestyle magazine! Her Magazine highlights the achievements of successful and rising New Zealand businesswomen. Her Magazine encourages a healthy work/life balance.

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Reality TV has been in the news again lately. From the underage diva of American white trash culture in Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, to catfights amongst the musical glitterati on international talent programmes, to New Zealand's own paroxysms of outrage over The GC and The Ridges, reality TV has once again been feeding press stories, editorials and tweet wars. The problem, as before, seems to be the trashiness of reality TV. Or, as Mike Hoskings put it about The GC, 'Congratulations to TV3 for providing this country with the most appalling, low rent, pointless piece of televisual crap I have ever seen in my life' (and, as a TV veteran, one presumes he's seen a lot). But does reality TV really sound the death knell of Western civilization, or even of New Zealand television culture? Though it's hard to remember that far back, in the late 1990s / early 2000s, New Zealand was a good testing ground for reality TV programmes. In this small country with limited production budgets and a hunger for local content, reality TV shows about police patrols, emergency services and property makeovers took early root and became a staple of TVNZ's primetime. In fact, shows like Flatmates (1997) and Treasure Island (2000) appeared on our screens before the international trendsetters Big Brother and Survivor, while a few programmes were invented here and then exported to the world (most notably Popstars in 1999, which became a runaway global success). Now, however, it seems that local broadcasters must either copycat anodyne international reality formats (watch out for this year's The X Factor NZ) or risk a backlash for dragging us into the mire of love-to-hate-it TV. TV3, who had traditionally left local reality TV production to TVNZ, entered the fray in 2012 with the funding scandal over The GC, a show about young Maori living it up on the Gold Coast which received nearly $420,000 from NZ on Air. The fact that NZ on Air thought it was funding a documentary about seven Maori families in Australia led to angry charges about 'our' misspent taxes. Funding local content is certainly a good idea, but there's a case to be made for supporting a diverse range of programmes. The GC, after all, averaged 300,000 viewers per episode, consistently rating in the top five shows. Perhaps not all of those viewers are blessed with Mike Hoskings' taste, but I dare say they're not all stupid either (I'm one of them, by the way). Rather than accusing The GC of being the worst television ever made, one could say that it's a welcome change to see shows devoted to Maori who aren't automatically synonymous with marae protocols or crime statistics. Local lives, after all, consist of diverse realities. Taika Waititi would know a thing or two about the value of that kind of production. Misha Kavka Department of Film, Television and Media Studies www.auckland.ac.nz www.h e rmagaz in e .co.n z | 83

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