The best pop culture of 2023
Featuring a New Zealand series right at the top of a very personal list
This is the last Rec Room of the year, so I thought… maybe I’d recommend some things? I’m very conscious that the utility side of this newsletter has been somewhat tested by my reporting on the supply side of our screens in recent weeks. I’m going to turn this one over to an indulgent list of my favourite pop culture of 2023. It’s a mix of podcasts, TV shows, music, movies, documentaries and even an innovation in sports, from both here and elsewhere. Putting those things together is silly, let alone in some order. But maybe ignore all that and trust the process — if you pay attention to these, I’m confident you’ll have a good time.
After the Party
For years, we’ve been told we couldn’t have the prickly Scandi-style dramas so beloved by critics because our networks needed broad shows to acquire broad audiences. Then TVNZ commissioned this deeply uncomfortable show about a maybe-paedophile teacher and his drunk, obsessive ex-wife. Somehow, it became a huge and beloved hit, gaining viewers as it went on — it’s surely the most talked about New Zealand show in years. Because it has also been picked up by the UK and Australia, there’s a decent chance this will become a global buzz show in 2024. It cost a lot but has become a triumph for the whole team, which made it — and its success might also bring dividends for the whole country’s screen industry. Watch it on TVNZ+
Bonus: Beef / A24’s hectic suburban road rage thriller for Netflix also mined the furies of middle aged parents in a very different style.
Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
Polachek has been making brilliant pop songs for over a decade, starting with Chairlift a lifetime ago. But her solo work is what has made her one of the most electrifying musicians on the planet. The album kicks off with ‘Welcome to My Island’, shimmering like ‘80s Miami freestyle. It confidently takes glitchy, shape-shifting hyper pop (‘Bunny is a Rider’) and soaring, skittering breakbeats (‘I Believe’) into something modern and wholly singular. Most of all, Polachek sounds like she’s loving figuring out this era, which, given my deep ambivalence about it, I really needed and appreciated.
Bonus: Olivia Rodrigo – Guts / Rodrigo is not much more than half Polachek’s age, but somehow her second album was much more 90s-indebted. This is not a problem – Guts is punk-pop perfection.
Megapod
Sometimes, a concept is so ridiculous you just know it will succeed. Toby Manhire proposed a 12-hour podcast in the leadup to what was, broadly speaking, the most tedious election of my adult life. When he floated it (I know, I was there), he had no plan. But by the time he set sail, there was an extraordinary lineup of interviews, a sharp debate among the Auckland Central candidates and two live episodes of Gone by Lunchtime at either end. It had moments of chaos but also deep reflection and piercing insight. I’ve rarely felt more proud to work at the Spinoff.
Bonus: The second season of Youth Wings was once again extremely odd and hilarious while also somehow giving you hope that maybe our politics won’t always be the way it seems now.
Jack Tame interviews anyone
Surely everyone remembers where they were when Jack Tame dismantled Winston Peters? It was one of a number of statement interviews during the campaign, which showed Tame with preternatural calm and a surgical level of preparation. It made these encounters more electrifying than any other set piece of the campaign.
Bonus: The minor party debates / just as the minor parties have defined the chaotic first weeks of this government, their debates were far more entertaining than the largely tedious main show.
Tour de France: Unchained
As a teenager, I would stay up all night watching Miguel Indurain grind away at the mountain stages of the Tour de France. Then, the drug scandals of the ‘00s whittled away at my interest. This year, before the great race, Netflix released Unchained, a documentary following the 2022 event, which revealed a new great rivalry between Jonas Vingegard and Tadej Pogačar. Unchained did what Drive to Survive has done so spectacularly for F1 and gave you the personalities inside the lycra — making this year’s sensational race far more appealing as a result.
Bonus: NBA in-season tournament / The NBA is the gold standard for evolving its sport in a fan-centric way (something NZ Rugby has belatedly set its heart on). The first in-season tournament brought drama to the early doldrums — an object lesson in product and packaging.
Scamanda
The true crime genre is now well-established as the most popular form of narrative podcast, and con-people is a popular sub-genre within that (the best NZ-connected example being ABC’s Snowball). Which is to say it takes a lot to break out — but Scamanda undeniably did. The story of a mother who faked a cancer diagnosis to inveigle her way into a family and a church was relentlessly shocking in its audacity, and masterfully told.
Bonus: Dear Jane / The Spinoff’s podcast about a woman confronting her relationship with a youth group leader decades after the fact was a huge and very moving hit in 2023.
Barbie
On the surface, a movie about a long-derided doll looked like the apogee of the IP-exploitation era — yet Greta Gerwig’s film managed to be both intellectually challenging and incredibly broad family fun. Mattel is now developing multiple future instalments, so be careful what you wish for — but as superhero movies look to be dying (The Marvels tanked at the box office), if this is what replaces it – well, we could do a lot worse.
Bonus: The Holdovers / A Christmas movie, inexplicably out locally in early January, The Holdovers couldn’t be further away from Barbie. It is an exquisite piece of 70s craft, reuniting the director and star of Sideways.
Succession season four
This year marks the end of HBO as the most powerful aesthetic force in television, as it gets sucked into the Warner Brothers Discovery / Max content soup. It’s a major cultural loss, but at least we got the final season of Succession — a sprawling, riveting portrait of the end of a media dynasty. The culture it portrayed is definitively waning — maybe creator Jesse Armstrong’s next show could turn the same gaze on big tech?
Bonus: The Bear season two / If HBO itself is largely gone, its influence remains palpable in stylish, idiosyncratic shows like The Bear, which only improved on its magic debut this year.
WHAM!
When the great pop canon of the 80s is assembled, it's typically headlined by Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson, and a well-trodden path from there. Wham! are often left out of the narrative — but Netflix’s documentary made a kinetic case to put them right at the heart of the conversation. It glides on a massive trove of archive footage, which shows just how much the modern architecture of stadium pop is built on their foundations.
Bonus: OneFour: Against All Odds / I called it the music documentary of the year last month — maybe tied with Wham! — and I’m still thinking about the dark story it uncovered now.
Below Deck Down Under season two
The most recent season of Below Deck Down Under (set in Australia and featuring multiple New Zealand crew including its star and heart, Aesha Scott) did all the things that make the show uniquely compelling. But it also dealt with one of the most shocking unintended incidents I’ve seen on a reality show. That it navigated a moment of such complexity with such care is part of what elevates what could easily be another tawdry workplace show to something way beyond the usual formula. Watch it all on Hayu.
Bonus: Alone / I devoured this franchise in 2023. It puts ten strangers into the wilderness with basic survival items and some camera equipment. In a world entirely mediated by technology, I was transfixed watching people create a life outside it (on a smart TV, of course). Watch it on TVNZ+.
Want even more recs?
has put together a great wrap of the year in local pop culture over at Boiler Room.
Thank you, and welcome to the table
We launched our fundraising campaign for What’s Eating Aotearoa just over three weeks ago. The line we tagged to it was “an ambitious fundraising campaign for an equally ambitious editorial project”.
We did not anticipate just how many of our supporters would rally four weeks out from Christmas at the end of a tough year to support longform journalism. We had an inkling the idea would be received well, but to have had more than $54,500 pledged from 1,148 people in three weeks has been an extraordinary reminder for us of the strength of our community, the merit of the idea and people’s goodwill towards (and belief in) The Spinoff.
We hit our target and then some. We end this year ready to take a break, enjoy some good kai and prepare for this ambitious editorial project. We cannot wait to share the work with you.
Ngā mihi nui, thank you and have a restful holiday season.
— Mad Chapman, editor of The Spinoff
Quick pop culture hits
A penultimate ‘what’s new to streaming’ for 2024, featuring the welcome return of the excellent Reacher to Prime
A great Sam Brooks feature on Viva La Dirt League, the West Auckland YouTubers who’ve built a major production facility from the passion of their fans
Anika Moa with maybe the funniest My Life in TV to date
Alex Casey with a fascinating must-read feature on the backstory to togs, togs, undies ad…
…and staying in the 00s at a Zed reunion show in Christchurch
A strong review for the latest instalment of the Basement’s consistently excellent Christmas show
Here’s a link to our daily one question quiz, in partnership with Skinny — get amongst.
A sequel to the TV awards
Part of the problem with TV is that people want to be paid to make it. That’s the big structural advantage social platforms have — the content is made for free by billions of volunteer workers. TikTok is the current zeitgeist platform, and it’s keen to stay that way. It did something really clever last week in Sydney, staging the third TikTok Awards and adding a New Zealand category for the first time. It should help break down a potential barrier to understanding and engagement from a commercial perspective. By codifying who your stars are and what they do, you help people build a mental map of TikTok beyond their algorithmic bubbles.
That’s how you become a form — by building stars. TikTok feels, for better or worse, like the 45rpm 7” single in 1960. A brand new merging of culture and technology, ignored by the establishment and figuring out what it will be. How it might impact the world is still undefined. This technology is effectively in the hands of the Chinese government and, therefore, a kind of undeployed media weapon. That complicates things. If only we had a high powered new tech minister to do some thinking about all this…
Stream the TikTok Awards on Neon
Also: I have a big feature coming tomorrow on The Spinoff, covering three young TikTok creators trying to figure out how to make it work for them
A must-see documentary
Last week, we debuted our final doco of the year, and you need to make time for it. The housing crisis has been the defining local issue of the past decade but has been broadly understood in terms of its impact on younger people and families. That’s understandable but incomplete, as Last Home Renters shows. It explores life for Rodney Patea in a story that has a special resonance for the documentary’s director, his daughter Vanessa.
Rec Room will be back in 2024 after a holiday hiatus. Thanks so much for reading!