Diana Wichtel: Why Warner Bros Discovery is wrong to axe The Project NZ

Despite the news that The Project NZ is to be axed, an admirable spirit continues in hosts Jeremy Corbett, Jesse Mulligan and Kanoa Lloyd. Photo / Instagram

OPINION

Television. Once it brought us together to watch the news with dinner balanced on our knees or to pass the time at work discussing whether the cut-to-black finale of The Sopranos was genius or just David Chase jerking the chain of an audience that was by then in the throes of a sort of Stockholm syndrome.

Once, shows were like old friends who checked in regularly to see if you were okay. And who doesn’t need that in these terrible times? Now we struggle to remember on which platform we’re bingeing some series made in Spain and badly dubbed with an improbable assortment of UK regional accents, the title of which we can’t recall.

So it was with heavy heart that I heard that, after seven years, old pal The Project is ending. Give or take Jeremy Corbett, I’m probably not the show’s target demographic. But for all its tech-savvy, pacy, youthful exuberance, it has the virtues of a type of good old-school television: defiantly local and drawing on shared pop culture memory of cosier times.

The Australian original was created by Rove McManus’s Roving Enterprises. Commentators have suggested the New Zealand show may have fallen victim to the cost of the licensing fee for the Project brand.

McManus always knew how to get an audience involved. His early 2000s variety show, Rove Live, could get a Sydney suburb — “If there’s anyone watching in Kirribill i…” — flashing its lights in unison. Our Project has viewers sending in photos (Scenes of New Zealand) and videos for air guitar competitions: “It’s Pippa in the paddock playing Guns N’ Roses!”

The line-up: three regular hosts — Kanoa Lloyd, Jesse Mulligan and, after the departure of Josh Thomson, Corbett, plus guest panellists, from Kate Rodger to Mark Richardson. The concept: “News delivered differently.” On this show the political tends to be personal. We’ve had Mulligan mourning the extinction of the Eyrewell beetle — “this precious native bug!” Lloyd has done heartfelt, powerful reports on youth suicide, life on a benefit and a memorably brisk takedown of the “bigotty” response to te reo on television. The other night there was an economical update on “baby brain” research. We don’t stay stupid, apparently.

During the election campaign, they had Winston Peters and his carnivorous grin on and made him play the party game, Kiss, Marry, Kick. “I’ll kiss him,” said Winnie, of Act’s David Seymour. He considered marrying the Greens’ James Shaw and gave Te Pāti Māori’s Rawiri Waititi the boot. “I don’t understand how you could be so anti the colonial and have a cowboy hat.” It was almost as revealing, and considerably less nerve-shredding, than the brawling on The Nation or Q+A.

The absence of the stiff tropes and unconvincing rituals of “serious” current affairs lends it an authenticity that is becoming increasingly rare. And full marks for being the first local newsy show since The Ralston Group, also TV3, to make a success of the panel format. Seven Sharp premiered with a Project-like three-host line-up but couldn’t make it work.

The team had to announce their imminent demise, as Judy Bailey once did, in a “and after the break, I’m sacked” kind of way. Corbett was philosophical. “My career’s littered with the bodies of dead TV shows.” Mulligan and Lloyd looked a little wobbly for a second. By the next show Lloyd was asking songwriter and producer Joel Little, who has worked with Lorde and a galaxy of stars, to see if Taylor Swift would give her a job. Shades of 1990, when new channel, TV3, was in trouble and Belinda Todd greeted her Nightline audience with, “Anyone wanna buy a TV station?” That admirable spirit survives on The Project. “So now the plan is to bring you awesome shows every night for as long as we are here,” declared Lloyd. It reminded me of the end of another great Three show, Campbell Live. The chutzpah, the talent, the heart. We haven’t got enough of that to keep throwing it away.