Tangata Pai is set in a recognisable Aotearoa New Zealand. Its central event, the bombing of a Māori land occupation, takes place in the first two minutes of screen time, at a real location: the Puke Ariki cultural centre in Ngāmotu New Plymouth. Yet it feels not quite like the present, but the near future.
That, observes its creator and director Kiel McNaughton, is literally the case. The story plays out on a day not far off: October 28, 2025.
“So it is very much the near future. We wanted to invent something, I guess, is the reason for that.”
The entire story takes place in the course of a single hour of that day. It’s told over eight parts, each accounting for eight minutes of the hour, in which its characters hurtle towards fate, their paths criss-crossing on the way.
Viewers should not necessarily expect to understand everything that’s going on in the first episode or two.
The ambitious dramatic structure was pitched to funders as a way to streamline production, says producer Kerry Warkia. With few locations and no need for costume changes, the series could be shot more quickly. But it dates back almost to the beginnings of Brown Sugar Apple Grunt, the screen production company she and McNaughton founded in 2007.
They even made a pilot, The Next Eight Minutes, before embarking on other projects, including the acclaimed anthology film Waru, told in eight parts. But when Te Māngai Pāho called for scripted drama proposals to break a run of factual shows, the idea found its time. Or, perhaps, the times found the idea.
“I guess the spark of Tangata Pai was the Toitū te Tiriti movement, the protests that were happening,” says McNaughton.
“Personally, I felt a desire to engage in conversation. I have never seen myself as an activist and this is still an act of being an artist or a creative.
“But I guess I wanted to be able to do something and investigate the different types of people who believe in a cause, or don’t believe in a cause – who feel as though they’re a good person, but are they doing enough to be a good person and sticking up for their beliefs?”
The clue is in the name: “tangata pai” translates as “good person” or “good people”.
The choice of Taranaki as the setting and location of the series has its own story. Warkia and McNaughton were determined the local mana whenua, Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa and the Ngāti Te Whiti hapū, would be involved from the beginning. Contact with the iwi was facilitated by journalist Mereana Hond, who is an executive producer on the series. Another member of the Hond whānau, Ruakere Hond, came aboard as kahui reo, an important role in a production that was always intended to have 30% of the dialogue in te reo Māori, with subtitles.
“I’m floored by the Honds as a whānau,” says Warkia. “They just have incredible energy for community, for people, for story, for language. Mereana came with all that energy and all that savvy.”
They went deep on it: the spoken dialogue coheres to the local mita (dialect), so we hear the soft “wh” sound in whānau. Warkia says she was determined to cast actors with whakapapa to the eight Taranaki iwi. With five leads – Willa (Ariāna Osborne), a singer looking for her identity; Ahorangi (Nicola Kāwana), a conflicted government minister; Miki (Jayden Daniels), a well-meaning but chaotic father; Adrian (Yoson An), an earnest cop of Chinese heritage; and Hinewai (Shavaughn Ruakere), a nurse under pressure – and a “main cast” of 50, it was no mean feat to wrangle.
The character of Adrian met a request from Te Māngai Pāho to reflect demographics representing “language allies”, but was also right in the territory of lead writer Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen, whose work, notably the stage play The Mooncake and the Kūmara, has focused on the intersection of te ao Māori and the New Zealand Chinese experience. But it had a resonance for McNaughton himself – he has Chinese ancestry and he and Hansen are first cousins.
“So I was really keen to put in a Kiwi-Chinese character who speaks Māori. The idea for Adrian is that he sees himself as an ally. He’s an ally for Māori. He’s idealistic and he just wants to help people. And by making him a police officer, obviously there’s a history with Māori and policing, especially where it concerns an occupation. So that kind of conflict was always going to be interesting to write.
“I have also been learning te reo Māori and one of the other students is a Kiwi-Chinese guy. He had reo better than me. Just watching him get up and do a mihi and really embracing the language was really heartening. For me, I suffer from the language anxiety and to be able to watch someone take up the language like that, there’s a mixture of feelings.”
Again, it all speaks to a high degree of ambition. “Yeah, it’s certainly ambitious – in everything,” says Warkia. “Ambitious in the scale of the project, ambitious in the maths of it all, in terms of how we wanted to shoot it and the timing of everything. Ambitious in the people we involved. And I think just ambitious in its vision for how we tell the story for audiences in New Zealand for a prime-time network with 30% te reo Māori and being, you know, genuine and authentic and real.
“I know those words are used a lot, and they feel kind of like buzzwords, but we really just wanted to be very sincere and genuine while telling complicated stories about flawed people and community – and saying we all still have to be able to continue talking to one another.”
“I guess we’re taking something that is relevant to the country at this time, and trying to create personal moments with these characters and the way they relate to something that we can relate to as a country,” says McNaughton.
“But then for an entertainment factor, let’s dial that up to 1000 and see what happens if something really horrific occurs.”
Tangata Pai screens on Three at 8.30pm on Tuesday, September 16, and will also stream on ThreeNow.
