Director-writer twins Sally and Elsie Bollinger didn’t originally pitch their paranormal comedy Little Apocalypse as New Zealand’s first scripted series by, for and about rainbow young people. But they’re stoked it wound up that way.
They and producer-writer Thomas Coppell proposed it as a 12-year-old with a teen sibling glued to their phone and practising makeshift witchcraft. That’s not as niche as it sounds in today’s TikTok world. But once the trio realised the unashamed queerness that arose during development, they “doubled down on the gay”.
Lashings of gunge à la What Now? and sassy sibling comebacks kick off the eight-part series. It opens with Leith (Linus Lloyd) livid about being left on “seen” by their crush and casting a spell to manifest a response. Instead, it opens a portal in their wardrobe for a mischievous poltergeist named Sunny (Jenny Mingxi Easton), who crashes Leith and younger sister Cole’s (Roshaniah Leo’o) summer holiday at Nanny’s (Geraldine Brophy).
The Bollingers are the daughters of screen and theatre director Katherine McRae and music writer Nick Bollinger. The sisters have created five web series as part of The Candle Wasters collective, including modernised Shakespeare retellings that have amassed seven million-plus YouTube views, for a mainly young audience. Coppell’s past kids’ shows have included factual entertainment show ConspiraSeries for RNZ Tahi and Coconet.
So the three working together made sense. It might be a comedy but it’s a job they haven’t taken lightly, ensuring the show’s queerness is joyful and the spookier themes are palatable for younger kids.
“We had some weird content growing up,” Elsie Bollinger reminisces. “When I was 12, I was constantly looking up at the next step. We’ve got a character who is 14, who the 12-year-olds look up to, and another who is 12, who the eight-year-olds look up to.”
Coppell adds that the era in which children’s shows talked down to them is at an end. They wanted younger viewers to feel part of the conversation. “Kids are resilient and smart and leaders.”
They also worked to ensure the queerness in the series wasn’t a cause of tension. Everyone uses the correct pronouns and there isn’t a plot point of whether Leith’s crush is gay. “They just are, it’s not a question,” says Elsie. “There’s no coming out, and we wanted to do that consciously.”
The character of Sunny is also queer, but it’s never mentioned. “Sunny doesn’t go, ‘I’m queer!’ They just are,” says Coppell. “I think that ability to exist and occupy space as a main queer character is as important as those stories where people are finding themselves.”
Internationally, queerness in kids’ shows has been around for longer than some people may realise. Bollinger says they were influenced by such late-2000s cartoons as Adventure Time, which she describes as “beautifully queer”. More recently, Netflix’s boy-meets-boy teen romance Heartstopper has been streamed globally for close to 24 million hours, showing audiences are ready for this representation.
And closer to home, excitement at the mere presence of Little Apocalypse’s main character is bubbling up from the pre-teen hotspot itself. “Our community engagement manager posted a TikTok where Leith and their crush, Anthony, give each other a little side-eye, and it broke the algorithm. It has had 70,000 views, with all these young Kiwi kids going, ‘I’m so excited for this show!’”
Many comments under the TikTok post double as requests for a season-two audition. Given the episodes were yet to be released, such demands have amazed the creators. But they, too, hope a second season will happen. “We don’t want to let them down.”
Little Apocalypse is streaming on TVNZ+.
