After the Party is queasy, morally complex and the best New Zealand TV drama in years
The six-part TVNZ drama explores the lingering, crazymaking aftermath of a boozy party and stars Robyn Malcolm at what might be her career peak.
It’s not true that there is a house style to New Zealand television drama, but there are some threads that show up here quite often. There’s the fusion of high stakes with comic elements, well-executed in previous Robyn Malcolm projects like Outrageous Fortune and Far North from earlier this year. This is likely both a natural outflow of the material and an attempt at going broad, which is understandable in a small market like ours. Less forgivable is a tendency toward caricature, with roles reduced to heroes and villains – a pernicious issue that infects plotting and scripts and flows out into performances that leave our fine actors grasping like the soap stars they once were.
Neither is remotely present in After the Party, a six-part drama that explores the lingering, crazymaking aftermath of a boozy party, featuring characters all on a spectrum between fallible and broken. It’s so tightly wound it barely takes a moment to blink, much less wink. I’ve seen the first three episodes and have no idea where they’re heading with this thing — it’s gritty, wrenching and highly confronting.
It stars Malcolm in what may prove a career-peak role, playing Penny, a teacher and grandmother who bikes everywhere through Wellington’s hills and wind. In school, she’s in complete control, coaching basketball and has seen every scenario before, sanguine and pragmatic about everything from porn to truancy. Outside though, she’s struggling – her relationship with her daughter is shaky, and worse still with her mother. She models for life drawing and commits well-intentioned acts of activist vandalism. She’s a person we’ve all known, or maybe even recognise a little in ourselves: that type who can’t go along to get along, who picks and picks, and presses until they alienate even those closest to them.
The catalysing event for a spiral into a mess of poor decisions is the return of her ex. Phil is played by Scottish legend Peter Mullan, who radiates care and bonhomie while hinting at an irresistible force beneath the surface. He’s been away five years after the brilliant, awful night alluded to in the show’s title and to which we return in flashbacks throughout. It’s a house party, and the air is electric. It’s getting the kind of loose, which is thrilling, but also leaves the door open for bad things. Two generations are getting out of it together, with the older group joined by a clutch of young friends of Penny and Phil’s daughter Grace, played with subtlety and power by newcomer Tara Canton.
The adults are doing shots, but so are the teens, and one, Ollie, gets into a state of semi-comatose nausea, vomiting all over himself. Later, Penny sees something appalling, something which changes the course of every life in the house. Only, what did she see? “Whatever you saw, it wasn’t that,” says Penny’s mother, knifing her in front of a roomful of their friends. “You’re making a fool out of yourself.”
This ambiguity is what the whole show pivots around. Penny can’t let it go; the community wants to move on. Phil’s return dredges all this unresolved tension to seethe at the surface. Penny is possessed by this knowledge – breaching friendships, boundaries and the law. You see how it eats her alive, burning through whatever vestigial relationships that have survived her obsession to this point.
It’s a dark, tense and highly provocative drama that will rattle uneasily around your mind for days. Malcolm’s Penny is an absolute marvel, a middle-aged woman the likes of which I’ve never seen on screen before: furious, relentless and dangerous to know. Does she refuse to look away from an ordinary household horror? Or can she not admit that her own behaviour made it this way? After the Party is in no hurry to reveal its awful secrets, and that makes it the most powerful TV drama we’ve created in years.
After the Party emerges at a tense time for NZ drama – more on that below. A longer version of this review will run on The Spinoff next week.
After the Party premieres on TVNZ 1 and TVNZ+ on Sunday October 29.
A message from Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman
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Recs from The Spinoff this week
On The Real Pod we’ve switched format recently to examine our recent pop culture past – this week features a dive into the birth and life of music channel C4, and what we miss from that era.
I’m writing this from Singapore and managed to catch Back on the Board, a Spinoff doc from earlier this year chronicling a wahine skateboarder returning from injury and navigating a complex life. It’s screening on Air NZ flights and is fantastic – watch it here.
Stewart Sowman-Lund writes a great feature on the piratical smash Our Flag Means Death.
Sam Brooks makes the case for Down for Love – an NZ production which has just been picked up by Netflix – as the new state of the art for dating shows.
And here’s a wrap of everything noteworthy landing on streaming this week.
The rise and rise of sports docuseries
It’s 14 years since ESPN placed a big bet on sports documentaries for its 30th birthday, commissioning 30 feature-length documentaries, many of them exceptional. In 2020, The Last Dance, reflecting on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, became a phenomenon. Now they’re ubiquitous and hugely impactful, with Drive to Survive credited as finally breaking F1 into America. Netflix has made a huge play in the area, with Beckham the latest to break through. As Alex Casey wrote in her review, the four-part series is incredibly compelling even if you hate football, revealing Posh and Becks as “a surprisingly playful pair of weirdos”.
See also: Wellington Paranormal star Mike Minogue’s empathetic reflections on what Stylebender reveals of how Israel Adesanya was broken and made.
The drama around our drama
While TVNZ should be very proud of the bet it has placed on After the Party, there are troubling signs that it’s not the start of a new golden age. The show came out of Te Puna Kairangi, a Covid-era government fund that has lapsed, and the powerful rebates underneath it will also be scrutinised by the incoming coalition. Some have also questioned TVNZ’s ongoing commitment to drama after it recently disestablished a key commissioning role. Well-read local screen newsletter Shownews asked pointedly, “if, a little over a year ago, two people were required to do the job, what’s changed at TVNZ that they now only need one?” It suggested TVNZ’s state ownership meant it could run at a loss.
Shownews also voiced a rumour circulating that some NZ On Air-funded content was being delayed until the next financial year purely to make this year’s bleak results look better. A TVNZ spokesperson confirmed this to Rec Room, saying, “we’ve had to make some changes in the short-term to reduce our costs... This includes deferring a small number of titles into the new year.” But they pushed back hard on the idea that it is backing away from commissioning. “Shownews’ perspective that we are not committed to local content or should run at a loss because we’d be bailed out by the government is not accurate,” they said.
The general bad vibe in the air for local TV was echoed in a recent note from screen production guild SPADA’s president Irene Gardiner, who noted that “Three's budget for local commissioning has been lean for a while, and now TVNZ's will also be tight.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that the local television industry has never been so challenged. What makes matters worse is that the incoming government has a few key figures openly hostile to aspects of the media and critical of the rebate and grant schemes that power it too. I’ll be reporting on moves made there here and on my podcast The Fold – the last couple of episodes have directly addressed that situation.
See also: Me analysing the potential impact of a National-Act government on local media and reviewing a particularly grim media debate in the week leading up to the election.
Please enjoy Chocolate Charvas
You know what’s not challenged? User-generated content, or UGC, running on social platforms. I want to keep an eye on the trends there too. Last week I was driving on Great North Rd, and a gold RAV4 pulled up playing an unfamiliar song. It sounded like bassline, a very working class UK garage subgenre I love. I shazammed it: banger. Then, the next day, my daughter sent it to me. The song came out in 2021; it was not particularly popular. Why was it suddenly blowing up in New Zealand? The answer is, duh, TikTok, where its opening bars have taken over an account called Kay the jeweller. It featured these three kids who call themselves “chocolate charvas” (black chavs, essentially) miming the lyrics, parodying the archetypal English pub geezer. They are now millions of views deep, and all that shows up when I hit the app – I was particularly into an Aussie outback version. It’s a reminder – which I really need as a person – that big tech platforms can be troublingly underregulated and also provide kinetic, chaotic human joy.
Finally, a word on how Rec Room’s readers can help make this thing pop
No one can be across everything, obviously – so to make this, I’ll rely on people from around The Spinoff, as well as from our readers. I want Rec Room to be a two-way thing – so if you’ve come across a show, a podcast, an album, or basically anything that feels like it fits in here – shoot me an email to duncan@thespinoff.co.nz. I would especially love to hear from people working in and around the culture industries in Aotearoa, whether it’s about an upcoming project or a story tip (treated in complete confidence) – because we need to know about the forces that forge our pop culture too. I can’t promise a reply to all – but I will read each and every one.
That’s all folks. Thanks for bearing with me. I’m so pumped to be here.
— Duncan
Also: If you enjoyed this newsletter, the most impactful things you can do to support it are, in order. 1) become a Spinoff member — the next year will be extremely hard for our media, and we will feel it too. And/or 2) Share this with anyone you think will like it and encourage them to subscribe.
