The must-see TV show that took two years to reach NZ streaming services
Why we're only just getting the chance to stream Colin Farrell's The North Water now. Plus: Netflix's hot show The Diplomat and a new podcast about a twisted British cult.
Kia ora and welcome to Rec Room! One of the best TV shows of the year is Paul T Goldman, a bonkers series 10 years in the making. Describing this thing is impossible: it sits somewhere between The Rehearsal and True Lies, according to those that are lucky enough to have seen it. Right now, in Aotearoa, there’s nowhere you can watch it. So today we’re going to talk about how and why some TV shows still take their sweet time getting to us, starting with the curious case of The North Water, which debuted to rave reviews in 2021, and landed just this week.
-Chris Schulz, senior writer
The North Water is late to streaming but you absolutely need to see it
Yes, that really is Colin Farrell up there, squinting his eyes, smoking a pipe and looking all surly, with greasy hair smeared across his forehead, a thick black beard smothering his chin and streaks of oil blackening his face and ears. When you look at this photo you can imagine exactly how he smells: a potent stench of Brylcreem, tobacco, musty sweat and rancid BO.
Farrell really went for it in The North Water. That’s not a fat suit. There’s no padding. “I ate a lot and lifted some heavy weights,” he told The Guardian about his approach for adopting the look of a psychotic Arctic whaler in the 1850s. “It was not done under the supervision of medical professionals at all and was really ill-advised.”
But he didn’t stop there. To tell the story of Henry Drax, Farrell went full method. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I was inhabiting this very different physical space,” he told Radio Times. The Irish actor went so hard, he says he won’t do it again. “I had a few little health things … and I was just like, fuck, this acting thing ain’t this important,’ he told ET. For his upcoming performance in The Penguin, he chose to wear the fat suit.
Farrell’s performance in The North Water might be the most extreme thing he’s ever done. Showrunner Andrew Haigh made his cast and crew go to the North Pole to make this show. It’s an intense watch. “This has blood, seal and whale killings, murder, rape, mayhem,” Farrell told The Guardian. “The vastness was extreme, the danger was extreme, the proximity was extreme. It was life-changing.”
You might have already heard about The North Water, because it came out way back in 2021. It received rave reviews at the time, with many comparing it to The Terror, another chilly exercise in grim boating mishaps. So why are we talking about it now? This week, two years after everyone else got to see it, The North Water finally makes its debut on a New Zealand streaming service – TVNZ+. (It did air on Sky TV’s Rialto channel over five weeks last year, but how many of us saw that?)
If you haven’t seen The North Water, I implore you to do so: it is a hard, glorious, troubling show with a killer ending. All those difficulties they had making it? All those pounds Farrell packed on? All that ice they had to deal with? Totally worth it. “Frightening,” is how a critic for The Age describes Farrell’s performance, and they’re not wrong.
Yet, in an era when we have access to a dozen streaming services, you can’t help but wonder why these delays keep happening. In some ways, things have changed since TVNZ held back four episodes of The Sopranos and we all found a way to watch them anyway. In other ways, they have not. If you’re a TV addict and want more than whatever the Netflix algorithm serves up, sometimes you need to find workarounds.
It happens often. I’m a Survivor diehard, yet I can’t stream a single one of the 44 seasons of the popular American reality show. Where’s Gomorrah, the brilliant Sicilian mob drug drama? (Neon has one season, but five have been made.) Where’s The Bureau, the incredible Parisian spy caper, or Les Revenants, the French ghost story? Ramy, supposedly one of the best TV comedies of the past five years, is nowhere to be found. Same deal with People Just Do Nothing, Los Espookys and The Detectorists, including last year’s Christmas special. (Some of these shows have appeared on local streaming services, but aren’t currently available.)
Many are praising Paul T Goldman as one of the year’s funniest TV shows – I found out about it through David Farrier’s Webworm newsletter, and he admitted passing around his Paramount+ password so friends could see it. As of right now, the only way anyone’s been able to watch that one here was at a one-off movie screening featuring all six episodes and a Q&A with Farrier and the show’s director afterwards.
Don’t get me started on Utopia, the violent, sadistic, torturous series splashed in cartoon colours and circus music that delivered two seasons of stunning television and then disappeared, leaving fans quivering wrecks. (Many years later I tracked down the creator Dennis Kelly for one of my favourite ever interviews.) You can watch the shit 2020 reboot on Prime Video, if you want to. That was cancelled after one season. Just this week, Mrs Davis, the new show from The Leftovers and Lost’s Damon Lindelof, debuted to rave reviews. Right now, there’s no way of streaming it here.
If you’re wondering why this keeps happening, the details are probably buried in layers of murky contracts and legal documents relating to streaming rights and regional variations of different international media conglomerates. As the streaming market gets more fragmented and squeezed, things only seem to get more complicated. (At some point, once the Warner Bros. Discovery service Max arrives here next year, Sky TV is likely going to lose access to all its HBO shows.)
These days, opening up apps and searching relentlessly for the shows and movies you want to stream, as I’ve done constantly while researching this piece, is becoming more and more commonplace. You almost need an Excel spreadsheet to make sure you’re doing your savvy switching right. I get it: streaming services like TVNZ+ are balancing the cost of buying the rights for a show against the payoff they’ll get from them. Do shows like Stath Lets Flats and The North Water deliver eyeballs for TVNZ+? The answer is probably not. So as strange as it may seem to have to wait two years to stream Colin Farrell’s finest performance, it’s still better late than never.
* Stream The North Water via TVNZ+.
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Why you need to see … Drops of God
The swirling, the swishing, the spitting: there’s so much pretension in the world of wine that it’s a ripe topic to be completely and utterly mocked. That’s the promise of Drops of God, which pits two peole in a blind wine taste test to see who gets to inherit an insanely expensive wine collection. Sounds like Succession? You’re not wrong – that’s exactly what some critics are comparing it to. (On Apple TV+ now)
Why you should listen to … A Very British Cult
My favourite thing is when a journalist gets completely and utterly obsessed with a story and won’t let it go. In A Very British Cult, BBC reporter Catrin Nye starts digging into a life coach from an organisation called Lighthouse who … well, let’s let The Guardian pick it up from here: “[The] sect [is] designed as a cover for a deeply unattractive man to have sex with other people’s wives in a cul-de-sac.” Yowsers.
On the Spinoff: Amplified’s third episode
Amplified connects music journalist Jess Fu with exciting local artists to embrace and explore their cultural roots. In episode three, Jess goes deep with Botswana-Aotearoa hip-hop artist Phodiso Dintwe about finding home, telling stories through music, and making a career out of a precarious practice. Made with the support of NZ On Air.
All the new stuff you can watch, right now…
Critics are raving about The Diplomat, the new Netflix series starring Keri Russell as a diplomat (obvs) trying to avoid a world war. According to critics, it sits somewhere between Homeland and Succession, and just listen to them rave: “Netflix’s smartest show in years” (Daily Beast), “Extremely entertaining” (Rolling Stone), “Talks a big game - and backs it up” (Indiewire), and, “Smart, twisty TV” (NPR). If you’re looking for something meaty to binge over the weekend, The Diplomat may be your best bet.
Elsewhere, there are plenty of must-see shows out this week, like the reboot of the much-loved 90s body-swap show Quantum Leap (Neon), which has already been renewed for a second season. Colin Farrell’s grim Arctic whaling yarn The North Water (TVNZ+) finally makes its New Zealand streaming debut, two years after it was released. Consent (TVNZ+), a dark college drama, also sounds like it’s worth checking out. Reviewers say Drops of God (Apple TV+) does for wine what Succession did for media – watch the tasty trailer here. And don’t forget that the second weekend of Coachella is streaming for the first time (minus Frank Ocean).
If you want to stay at home and watch movies from the comfort of your couch, Ana de Armas and Chris Pine’s Ghosted (Apple TV+) looks like an update of Mr & Mrs Smith with a little more rom-com thrown into the mix. If you’re heading out to theatres, be careful: Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix’s Beau is Afraid is the week’s big new release, and it’s had some indecipherable reviews. Sample: “Bonkers movie is almost unreviewable,” declared News.com.au’s bewildered critic. Consider yourself warned.
Everything you need to know…
Wondering what Three’s new reality show Blow Up is like? Alex Casey calls it “quite a lot of fun” but points out there are clear environmental concerns involving all of those balloons. Read here review here.
Arnie’s back in his first ever TV series. Go on, you know you want to watch the trailer for Netflix’s Fubar. (Yes, there are one-liners … and he rides a motorbike.)
Struggling to hear the characters on your favourite TV show? Prime Video has found a solution to streaming era’s mad mixing issues, offering viewers the ability to boost dialogue volumes. Let’s hope more streamers follow suit.
Wondering if you should spend the weekend at home watching the livestream of Coachella’s weekend two? Here’s our review of everything that happened in weekend one.
Rupert Murdoch has clauses in his contracts that restrict family, friends and ex-wives from leaking stories to the writers of Succession, says Vanity Fair.
What is Suzanne Paul doing entering the Briscoes multi-verse?
Finally, here’s the trailer for the reboot of the controversial 1987 box office hit Fatal Attraction, featuring Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson. According to The Guardian, it’s a major sign that raunchy thrillers are back in vogue.
That’s it for Rec Room for this week. If you liked what you read, why not share Rec Room with your friends and whānau.
