There is a sense of invasion of privacy, and that you shouldn't be watching it. But Benefits Street is weirdly uplifting television, too.
Poverty is politics. But should it be entertainment? Actually make that, should it be take-the-phone-off-the-hook, can't-bare-to-miss-it entertainment?
It would be fair to say that I've been riven while watching the reality television series Benefits Street (8.30pm, Wednesdays, TV One). And I'm not alone.
It is perhaps the most controversial programme to screen in Britain this year, generating close to a thousand complaints to that country's broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom, and has been the subject of questions in Britain's Parliament. It was excoriated by some television critics and political commentators as "poverty porn", while a number of Benefits Street's participants have said they were lied to by the programme's makers. Meanwhile Channel Four, which screened it in Britain, responded to the hundreds of complaints it received by running an hour-long panel discussion about poverty and other issues raised by the programme immediately after the final episode.
If you haven't watched it yet - and I am certainly recommending you catch up on the first two episodes on TVNZ Ondemand before watching the remaining three over the coming weeks - the series is simple enough: it's about one street, James Turner St, in a suburb called Winson Green in the central English city of Birmingham. There are 99 houses in James Turner St. There are two-parent families. There are single-parent families. There are people of 13 different nationalities. There is even a prison at the end of the street.