The Lounge
Go Girls of North Shore return
by Fiona Rae
Sex and the North Shore City is back. You go, girls.
It must be something to do with the essentially pragmatic Kiwi character that when we make television drama, we generally don’t go for heavy religious metaphors, or time travel, or superheroes, or mind readers. Let’s leave all that to the Americans, we say, we hold no truck with that nonsense here. Well, probably. It could just be our tiny budgets. But whatever it is, the best television dramas of the past 10 years have been character-driven slices of a New Zealand we all recognise.
We’re talking of Mercy Peak, set in a small town; The Insiders Guide to Love, with its weirdo Wellingtonians; and, of course, Outrageous Fortune, with its Westie Aucklanders. And Go Girls (TV2, Thursday, 8.30pm), back for a second season, after rating its (no doubt white) pants off last year. Say what you like about putting a blonde, a redhead and a brunette together in a show, but it worked in Sex and the City, and it works here: Amy (Anna Hutchison), Britta (Alix Bushnell) and Cody (Bronwyn Turei) are the easily identifiable girls from the North Shore (guess that makes their bloke friend Kevin – Jay Ryan – Carrie Bradshaw. He is the narrator, after all).
When we left the Go Girls (and boy), their quest to find love, fame and fortune hadn’t been entirely successful. As the new season begins, Amy is now massively in debt, Britta is famous only with the under-fives, and Cody is married, but to a gay league player. At least Kev got his sports steering wheel. This season? New and bigger objectives, say the producers. Naturally.
