TV Preview: Feedback

There is no shortage of material for news satire programme, Feedback. Photo / Supplied

I am now scarily addicted to local drama This Is Not My Life - but I'm ashamed to admit when I reviewed it I hedged my bets. After the first double episode I couldn't tell if it was going to be consistently brilliant and mind-bendingly existential. So, I am not sure I can trust my judgment after a single episode of anything any more.

But, after previewing the first episode of TV2's late-night local satire Feedback, I'm prepared to declare it is destined to be head-spinningly excellent. It is also subversive, louche, crazy, risque and a surprisingly hard-hitting treatise on the debased values of the news media.

The news is easy pickings for parody: the writers are spoiled for choice with reporting of the "It's only as dawn breaks the true extent of the devastation becomes apparent" ilk. And if anyone can poke through its bogusness, it is the threesome behind Feedback, a group of writers who are probably the closest we will ever get to our own version of UK's Private Eye.

Feedback's creators are Philip Smith (Eating Media Lunch), Matt Heath (Back of the Y) and Arthur Meek, whose play called On the conditions and possibilities of Helen Clark taking me as her young lover won the Chapman Tripp theatre award.

All three of the creators don't seem to have been held back by their network bosses. Feedback certainly has the most masterly mime of a blow job I've ever seen. I wonder if Great Southern Television will soon hear from Marcel Marceau's lawyers.

The premise for Feedback is not all that different from Smith's Eating Media Lunch, with Meek in the Newsboy role, although this time with a backstory.

Feedback spoofs a TV news show, fronted by Meek playing a disgraced current affairs presenter, also called Arthur Meek. Using one's own name may or may not be a reference to the Jacqui Brown Diaries. Like much of Feedback, it is easy to feel you are missing lots of in-joke nudges and subtle digs.

Feedback features obvious spoofs, such as giving a serve to Campbell Live over its faked Waiouru medals story, but there are other newsroom in-jokes and caricatures.

I work in the media and I still feel on the outer edge of all this backslapping smartarsery so there is a risk that civilians may miss the gist.

I don't think so, though. I think viewers outside media cliques will appreciate having their intelligence acknowledged - that punters watching the news can see through gratuitous live crosses, sentimental beat-ups and lily-livered overseas reports. They will certainly enjoy the narcissistic airhead host and the cynical, rackety reporters.

Of course, in its evisceration of the news, Feedback owes a nod to the brilliant Australian satire Frontline. It was a seminal show: I think I might have even had my own Brook Vandenburg moments back in the mid 1990s. I just hope, like Frontline, Feedback will serve up more parodies of real stories, media disgrace and cretinous cliche.

I hasten to add this Wednesday is the first episode of Feedback and the rest could all be crap. But I don't think so.

Feedback debuts on TV2 Wednesday at 11pm.

-Herald On Sunday / View