Orange Roughies: mind your step!
TV Review
Yawning gulf
by Diana Wichtel
Calamity Jane meets Garbage Boy. This can only be New Zealand’s latest water-borne drama series.
High drama on the Hauraki Gulf. No, not our latest attempt on the America’s Cup but something just as likely to spring a leak, if past experience is any guide. Orange Roughies is TV1’s new Water-Rats-meets-Border-Patrol drama series, which for some reason seems to have been named after Belinda Todd. It premiered with a movie-length episode that didn’t exactly have you leaping to your feet and bursting into a chorus of “Loyal”. Especially since the show comes pre-emptively armed with imported Aussie stars – McLeod’s Daughters’ Zoe Naylor and someone called Nicholas Coghlan who, to be fair, is so far acting so sullen that you could easily mistake him for a Kiwi bloke.
The series screens at 9.30pm, a timeslot that TVNZ seems to reserve for Bodies and other programmes that will leave you whimpering in stark terror after encounters with nothing scarier than a National Health Service doctor. Sadly, despite a premiere dealing with child-sex trafficking, there was nothing in Orange Roughies to frighten the horses. Though the premiere should have come with a warning for viewers offended by the use of family-oriented swear-words – “Never bloody mind!” and the particularly gritty “Fan-friggin’-tastic!” – at an allegedly adult hour. A new Broadcasting Standards Authority survey has just revealed that we are fairly freaking relaxed about grown-up language after 8.30pm.
Never mind. Roughies tried to compensate for any wimpiness on the language front by going for some sort of cop-show world record for the beating up of a whimpering informant with a giant marital aid. After watching several gloatingly shot scenes set in Mr Softie’s Joy Toy Emporium, you couldn’t accuse the show of lacking cojones.
There was also the obligatory topless Bada Bing strip-club scene. And local television drama’s traditional mixing of metaphors – “It better not rebound and bite me on the arse. I can’t afford to have cowboys running around!” – sometimes produced an intriguing Broke-back Mountain effect.
That’s about as adult as it got. Though the show’s concept is promising, if hardly innovative. A mix of guaranteed-to-clash personalities is brought together to form a covert team of police and Customs officers. This is New Zealand drama, so the one bossing everyone around is a woman. The clueless, emotionally challenged ones are men. Zoe Naylor (also familiar to fans of Sports Cafe as the show’s perky Australian correspondent) plays senior Customs officer Jane Durant, who runs (a bit like a girl, it must be said) around the holds of dodgy ships, shouting authoritatively, “You boys come with me!” and “Mind your step!”
She finds herself bumbling into a stake-out – something to do with getting the wrong “intell” about an “op” or something – thus getting off on the wrong foot with laconic, leather-jacketed detective sergeant Danny Wilder. He’s already in a bad mood after drawing the short straw when it came to who had to hide in a rubbish skip. They hate each other on sight in the approved manner.
Him: “Calamity Jane!”
Her: “Garbage Boy!”
But things move right along in New Zealand television drama, so they are soon sharing a dinner of noodles and developing a grudging respect for each other.
There wasn’t a lot of action. The most violent scene involved detective constable Zack Wiki’s wife Donna. First, because she’s ovulating, she makes him fulfil his conjugal duties in the car on the way to work. Then she hurls an entire dinner set at him because he keeps getting injured at work. Women.
This was the first episode, so there was inevitably a lot of scene-setting. It’s slightly dispiriting to find that we’re still doing this in a rather heavy-handed manner. Wilder and Durant’s bosses kept having conversations where one barked lines such as “I want an ongoing inter-agency operational task force!” at the other. “I’m talking about a below-the-radar, blue-collar unit of less than six!”
Rather than let us discover the qualities of our leading duo slowly, the episode did a running CV of the pair: “Wilder’s not your average DSS … dive ticket, commercial launch master’s ticket, two years with surveillance, time in the Armed Offenders and a Royal Humane Society medal for his work with Search and Rescue!”
As for Durant, she seemed to have most of the above. She also had a masters in criminal psychology and the ability to speak Chinese, had discovered a cure for the common cold and was working on world peace.
Wilder is a devoted solo dad and Durant is adored by the Chinese child whom she saved from the traffickers. Whatever happened to the deeply flawed anti-hero?
It’s early days. With any luck, the main characters will develop to become a little less like that head prefect you hated at school. It was left to William Wallace’s Tom Bowden, the obligatory Swanni-wearing undercover oaf, to run amok shooting steroids into his leg and going into violent rages against windscreen washers at intersections. His subtle comic timing was a welcome relief from the sometimes too obvious dialogue. (I’m a moody bastard!” says the steroid-soaked one, just in case we hadn’t noticed.)
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