TV review
Driven to desperation
by Diana Wichtel
It’s all very complicated. Eight people going about their business are enmeshed in an increasingly complex web of interconnections and repercussions as a result of a spectacular ambulance crash. On one level, the set-up for TV2’s The Insiders Guide to Happiness is about as probable and challenging as the obligatory apocalyptic Shortland Street season finale.
On another level – and how often does a local television drama even have another level – Insiders Guide’s pinball approach to plot could be seen to reflect a slightly claustrophobic local reality. Here’s further evidence that any New Zealand city is still a small town at heart, and everyone operates at only a degree or two of separation from everyone else.
So, to jump on board Insiders’ wacky ride at a random stop, hairdresser Tess’s lover, Matthew, is killed dashing into the path of the crashing ambulance. He drops a winning lottery ticket, later found by nice-but-a-bit-dim Tina, who happens to be Tess’s client.
Tina is also (by coincidence or some sort of preordained cosmic law, depending on how the show’s metaphysics play out) the sister of Julie, who survives the crash. Julie’s husband Simon, being transported to hospital thanks to asphyxia by mushroom (!), does not. So that’s the end of him. Possibly. Matthew is dead, too, but he’s still hanging around, possibly trying to figure out the plot.
Toxic sacked television newsreader Lindy just avoids getting wiped out in the crash that she may have caused when a vase she is carrying breaks on the road, forcing a courier bike to swerve. Throughout all of the above, James is trapped, for some reason, in a sort of Twilight Zone car wash. His car radio plays only Buddhist chanting.
Well, you had to be there. Even then, you might not be much the wiser. They’re repeating the episodes on Sunday nights, offering viewers bewildered by the incestuous relationships and intersecting storylines a chance to confirm that they still don’t know what the $%@! is going on. Someone really should consider putting out an Insiders Guide to the Insiders Guide. Or they could set up community discussion groups, as the Greens want to do with the Treaty. This is drama that makes getting to grips with the foreshore and seabed seem like a piece of cake.
Of course, the title warns us that we are in for something existentially taxing. It’s a brave writer who echoes Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The title gives rise to expectations of an eventual answer to the questions about life, the universe and everything that the series raises. Note to Peter Cox: “42” won’t cut it this time.
Then there’s the title’s missing apostrophe. As with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, this gives considerable scope for pointless interpretation. Is this a guide for insiders? Are the insiders doing the guiding? Are we all, as insiders, our own guides to happiness? Or is Cox just unconcerned about punctuation?
Deep stuff. Though there are some reminders of lesser television dramas past. From memory, the ill-starred City Life also began with someone being dispatched by a road accident, in which core characters connected to him were involved. There was much messing with reality in that series by way of the dreaded dream sequence.
But, happily, it seems that, so far, Insiders Guide owes more to the bleak, moody, blackly comic tradition of the local film industry: weird behaviour, questions of identity, dead bodies hanging around, bad driving …
Television of unease.
Certainly, everyone in the series, living or dead, seems to be having a crisis of some sort or other. “It’s hard to understand why I’m here looking at my own corpse,” muses Matt. Julie responds to Simon’s death by burning all his stuff in the bath, microwaving her cellphone and then asking the Great New Zealand Question: “Is that normal?”
I suspect, though, we’re in for something ultimately more uplifting than Kiwi Gothic as usual, if Insiders Guide’s fondness for inspirational messages -– “Sometimes accidents happen for a reason”; “Watch out for endings. They might just be beginnings in disguise” – is any indication.
Lest things get too earnest, there’s plenty of nicely understated humour to be going on with. “What do they call that?” asks Julie, eyeing the conveyor-belt machinery as Simon’s casket is prepared for cremation. “I call it my in-tray,” says the deadpan crematorium guy. “Is this takeaway?” he wonders, as she waits for the dismal process to take its course.
Later, at the pizzeria, Julie watches uneasily as her dinner goes through something similar. Nice. Here’s a drama unafraid to make the bravura leap between sudden death and a capricciosa with extra anchovies.
Insiders Guide is also unafraid to raise the big questions: why is Julie putting tablespoons of Simon into little boxes and mailing them to people? If objects pass straight through Matt’s dead hands, why can’t he just walk through the damned door? Is it cosmic coincidence that the least appealing characters work in television? And how will this unfortunate stereotyping impact upon the series’ chances if it goes for more NZ On Air funding?
So far, so odd, but in a good way. Or, as someone says to James, “You’re too weird. I like that.” In fact, if they can keep it up over the long haul, local television drama could finally have struck gold.
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