With the double-header long weekend comes a welcome chance to escape streaming slop, writes Alex Casey.
Over Easter I texted my husband Joe a sentence that perhaps nobody in human history has ever texted: “hurry up geostorm is starting”. No punctuation, no capitalisation, not because I was trying to be ee cummings or Gen Z with it, but because I was becoming irate in our Hokitika cottage that he was going to miss the start of the Saturday night blockbuster on Three.
The heavenly combination of a Gerard Butler disaster film and a West Coast bach being lashed with rain reminded me of a compelling slideshow that writer Saraid de Silva presented during last year’s Word festival. It was about the optimal situations in which to enjoy certain foods, such as a handful of almonds eaten barefoot on a hardwood floor, a toasted English muffin with baked beans in a hailstorm, or two beers on an empty stomach at after-work drinks.
I like to apply a similar framework to television movies and holiday locations. There was the misty night in the Marlborough Sounds when, after a spooky dog walk around the marina where we didn’t see a single other person, we flicked on the TV just as The Bone Collector was starting on Duke. Or there was shutting out the sun to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on TVNZ2 in Whananaki, while stingrays flitted around the estuary on a hot summer’s night.
What made these combinations even more magical is that I didn’t engineer them – another human being did. Left to my own devices over a long weekend or holiday getaway, I would likely do what I always do. I’d frantically start three or four different zeitgeist shows or movies before getting agitated or distracted, switching them off, and going on my phone while some atrocious Ted Bundy: The Musical crime slop plays in the background.
It’s not just the choice paralysis that has been gnawing away at me, but the suspicion that I am paying through the nose to enjoy almost next to nothing. In a rare moment when I knew what I wanted to watch (Bridget Jones’ Diary on Valentine’s Day, sue me!), I perused all the streamers and could only find it available to rent on Neon for an additional $8. What are we all paying hundreds of dollars a year for, if not guaranteed access to Bridget Jones at all times?
Which brings me back to the bliss of watching terrestrial television somewhere outside of Hokitika. On Good Friday we indulged in The Chase and later The Repair Shop, a show I genuinely find so pure, so overwhelmingly gentle and sentimental, that I actually can’t watch it during my regular life. The Repair Shop deserves a viewer unencumbered by phone reception, fully present to the ache of a man hearing his dead father’s oud for the first time in decades.
Then came Book Club: The Next Chapter, an ensemble film featuring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburger and Candice Bergen as old friends who head off on a luxury trip to Italy. We both sat there captivated by the shonky script (“Rome is a great walking city, but it’s an even better sit-around-and-drink-wine city!”) and pondering how such brilliant actors had been reduced to kaftan caricatures. 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, five-star weird viewing experience.
What added to the surreality was what happened during the ad break. “We’ve found the perfect sheets recipe” an ad for Hotelsheets.co.nz cooed, as I tried not to green out too hard at the phrase “sheets recipe”. That was soon followed by an ad for the Soft Sitter, which seemed like a silicone baking tray for… your bum? And you can put an egg on it and then sit on the egg? And the egg doesn’t crack? And it somehow costs $79.95? Over five monthly payments?
Speaking of cracking eggs, the brilliant Easter programming continued the next night with the perfect Three double feature of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the aforementioned Geostorm. Gene Wilder and Gerard Butler, two screen icons together at last. The coastal wind howled along with Mrs Bucket as she goaded Charlie to cheer up, mercifully quietening down just in time so I could enjoy the most satisfying bite ever committed to the silver screen.
Joe got back not long after my text for a frenzied explanation about the premise of Geostorm: the entire world is constantly experiencing severe storms thanks to the climate crisis (too soon!) but Gerard Butler invented an enormous net of satellites (?) wrapped around the whole world (?) called Dutchboy (?) that can shoot (?) the storms dead (?) before they happen. Except now it is not working, so he has to go back to space for a Repair Shop moment of his own.
Despite Geostorm’s appropriately apocalyptic 18% on the Tomatometer, we of course watched the whole thing and loved it – even when a poor woman in Rio froze to death in her bikini while trying to escape an ice tsunami (?). When I got back behind the desk on Tuesday, I knew I had a job to do. As journalists, we are privileged to have access to the halls of power, and I can’t imagine a person more powerful than whoever programmed Geostorm to run after Willy Wonka.
That person was Jesse, who has been a part of Three’s programming team for five years. Over email, I asked him what magical ingredients, a “sheets recipe” if you will, he uses to create perfect holiday programming. While numbers factor into it – how similar titles have performed in similar time slots – there is also a heavy dose of vibes and flow. “You don’t want to give your audience whiplash going from an animated Smurfs film into Blumhouse’s Insidious,” he wrote.
Long weekends provide an interesting challenge as many people are away from home and their regular routines. “Often they’re at the bach or spending time with family, so it helps to look for something that’ll appeal to Mum, Dad, Great Uncle Phil, and Nan,” added Jesse. “If I can tap into a sense of nostalgia, that’s huge, because then it’ll span multiple generations, and hopefully gets Mum going ‘hey kids, come watch this great movie I’ve always loved!’”
As for the specific Gene/Gerard double feature, Jesse happily explained his working. “They both have this kind of futuristic, dystopian vibe going on where the little guy wins (Charlie and Gerard Butler’s character Jake),” he wrote. “But they’re both, in a sense, comfort films. Willy Wonka for its now decades of nostalgia, and Geostorm kind of wraps you in an action-packed, Gerard Butler-starring embrace – because you just know he’ll save the day.”
(Spoiler alert: Gerard Butler did save the day and then he also saved Easter Sunday, with another Three double-header of Peter Rabbit followed by Gods of Egypt.)
Now facing another long weekend where I am likely to make more shocking streaming decisions without a trained professional deciding for me, I ended by asking Jesse why it is so important that humans still programme TV. His answer was simple: because it’s humans who are watching. “It might sound a little crazy in today’s fast-paced, content-rich, algorithm-driven world to sit down and watch something that’s been handpicked by an actual person,” he wrote.
“But I think there’s always something comforting – something nostalgic – about turning on the telly.”
