By FIONA RAE
Newsflash - apparently, single women out in the dating scene can be quite raucous. They drink, flirt, make inappropriate bets with their friends and send their one-night stands home at 2 in the morning. Incredible.
DNZ's second offering, after last week's documentary about Carolina Anderson and her family, is Girls Behaving Badly (TV One, 8.30pm), a study of three single women in their 30s in Auckland.
The title sounds like another documentary about how women are now free to behave as stupidly as men, but then Women Behaving Sensibly doesn't have the same appeal, does it?
Maybe the programme-makers didn't look hard enough, but frankly, these women, Sarah, Raewyn and Annemieke, aren't exactly the Fat Slags from Viz. You couldn't even really call them ladettes, as the publicity would have us believe.
All have fairly full-on careers, all are old enough to know who they are and what they want out of life, and to know exactly what they're doing when they hit the bars in the Viaduct.
"The guys are only after one thing," a bouncer tells Sarah, "and it's not to make you happy." Thanks for the advice, buddy, but Sarah is savvy enough to make up her own mind. After listening to one guy's rubbish chat-up line, she manages to get rid of an annoying Italian and goes home alone.
If she was behaving badly, you get the feeling the cameras weren't there at the time. She does make a rather interesting bet that depends on the outcome of a Warriors game (she works for the sponsor), but doesn't have to go through with it. And it was with a female friend. So naughty.
Raewyn, on the other hand, is seen pashing a Canadian outside a bar, having left her boyfriend, Martin, inside. We've watched enough Sex and the City to know what this tactic is - diversionary. She's struggling to admit she might actually, kind of, you know, love Martin.
Annemieke faces the most interesting challenges. At 39, she is at a crossroads in her life. At the beginning of the programme, she is happy, successful and confident in her single-ness.
But life threw her a couple of curveballs during the six months the camera crews were on her tail and she's also starting to look at babies in pushchairs - and talk about motherhood with her gay flatmate.
"Being single does have an expiry date," she comments. Despite saying she likes her wrinkles, she investigates options for having her eyes tweaked by a plastic surgeon.
By the end of the six months, things have changed quite a lot for all three of the women but, on the whole, this is rather an underwhelming documentary, despite the addition of a couple of lifestyle experts.
Has DNZ run out of subject matter already? Aren't there a million stories in the naked city? What about the naked country? DNZ seems to be travelling the path already taken by TV3's Inside New Zealand, and next week's programme isn't inspiring much confidence that it will veer off on to an interesting side road - it's Celebrities' Wives. Oh dear.
Girls in control of sex and the city
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