Hungry for the Leftovers

Carrie Coon and Justin Theroux in The Leftovers. Photo / Supplied

Back when New Zealand television was three channels of hospital dramas and bad sitcoms along with one hard-to-find channel of misdirected youth programming and whatever Sky was showing, it was easy to plan your television viewing: If you had a bookcase in your living room, you went to The Listener; otherwise you went to TV Guide.

On Sunday nights, you carefully highlighted your selected programmes for the week ahead, hen you made sure you were at home to watch them. It was called "appointment viewing", although Ally McBeal aside, there were very few shows that justified the term.

Today, though, there are great programmes everywhere you look, although very few are on Three. There are four paid streaming services - Lightbox, Neon, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix - on which you can call up whatever they've got whenever you want it, and there's Sky On Demand, TVNZ on Demand, Three Now and Maori Television on Demand, on which you can do the same for free.

We live in a world in which we can use our phones to access basically all the world's collected information and music, whenever we want, for no pay, and basically all the world's movies and books for a small fee, but we cannot, in any legal way, no matter how much money we're prepared to spend, watch a surprisingly large proportion of the world's best television at a time of our own choosing, without sending an unusually large amount of money to Mighty Ape in exchange for a DVD, which is a technology that once existed.

What this boils down to is: Why, given all the streaming technology and vast, seemingly endless piles of content, can I not - for the love of God - find any legal way in which to watch The Leftovers, which industry benchmark Metacritic rates as the most critically acclaimed series of 2017?

The reasons for this are complex and boring, and involve terms like "rights windows", "stacking rights" and "rolling rights" and other euphemistic terms Big TV has coined, which all basically boil down to "This show available for a limited time only".

The buying and selling of these rights is the foundation from which TV producers, distributors, broadcasters and other television splinter groups make their millions off us, advertisers and each other, but the whole thing is absolutely ripe for violent disruption by some Spotify-style opportunist who is able to gather all existing televisual content and give us unlimited access to it for not very much per month.

"Nobody wants to work hard to find content," TVNZ's Kevin Kenrick said in a press release last year, in which he went on to explain that the company is attempting to consolidate all its entertainment content online. But this sounds a lot like missing the point. Like every other content platform, TVNZ can't make it easy to find the content we want - only the content it has. And, when it comes to what we most want, they, like all the others, have only some crumbs, when what what we want is The Leftovers.