Viewers have responded with mixed feelings about last night's debut of Hope and Wire, a new three-part drama series based on the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes.
Created by veteran director Gaylene Preston, hopes were high that Hope and Wire would do televisual justice to one of the country's worstdisasters.
Each episode is feature length, and last night's debut dealt with the shock of the September 4, 2010 event, and the tragedy of February 22, 2011.
Throng reported the first episode drew in 248,440 viewers, TV3's second most-viewed show of the night, below House Rules with 267,860 viewers.
In a preview for TimeOut, Christchurch-based reporter Kurt Bayer, who reported on the quakes and their aftermath, wrote the first "episode pulls no punches" and was "raw, but done with sensitivity".
"It might prove too painful for many Cantabrians to watch, but it should provide Kiwis outside Christchurch with a better understanding of just exactly what happened during the tumultuous recent period of our history," he wrote.
Critic Russell Brown praised the show's portrayal of the earthquakes and the blending of real-life footage with scripted drama, but said the overall result was "awkward".
"What we've wound up with is patchy and sometimes outright clunky," he wrote on his blogsite Publicaddress.net.
