Three's new current affairs show Paddy Gower Has Issues walks a tonal tightrope - balancing comedic heckling and light-hearted investigations with in-depth reporting on the big issues.
Patrick Gower is the host of Paddy Gower Has Issues. Photo: DISCOVERY
About 40 minutes into the first episode of Paddy Gower Has Issues, Newshub's Laura Tupou spoke about how moved she was by some students she spoke to during her investigation into New Zealand's why reading rates have fallen.
"Seeing children's faces light up when they were able to read books and understand what they were reading, I'm just like: 'Why can't every kid learn how to read in this country? Why doesn't every school teach how to learn to read in this way?"
The show's host, Patrick Gower, said he would be grilling Minister of Education Jan Tinetti on the issue shortly.
Before he could get to that though, he had another topic on address: Karen O'Leary's investigation on behalf of her friend Zoe into why our supermarkets play such sad music.
The quick transition from literacy to levity is typical for the show, which walks a tonal tightrope between comedy and serious, in-depth investigations.
The show’s first episode was centred on these two threads - Tupou's heavy and technical look at literacy and comedian O'Leary's light but still surprisingly rigorous deep dive into supermarket tunes.
Tupou interviewed school teachers, principals, students, and academics to build the case for classrooms to adopt a structured – rather than balanced – method of reading education.
That might sound a little academic, but interviews with students and educators gave it a personal touch.
Meanwhile, O'Leary spoke to a Danish academic who has spent 30 years studying the effects of music on shopping habits.
"What say I wanted to make someone buy mince? If I had them just hearing the word 'mince' on repeat over and over again, do you think that would work?" she asked.
"Um, that's a good question," he replied.
O'Leary tested that by sending three shoppers around a Countdown with headphones playing different soundtracks: one happy, one sad, and one with 'mince' on repeat.
Unfortunately, there was a flaw in the operation: the mystery mince shopper was vegan.
"I didn't know that," deadpanned O'Leary in a conversation with Gower.
The contrast between these two topics would be stark at the best of times.
But it was made starker by the show's unique structure, which saw Tupou and O'Leary's investigations spliced together in four sections each over the course of its hour-long runtime.
Despite the tricky format, the transitions were generally smooth.
Patrick Gower hosts Paddy Gower Has Issues Photo: NEWSHUB
Part of that is thanks to the show's host, who successfully mixed serious and silly in this segment defending a now-aborted feral cat killing competition for kids in North Canterbury.
In-house comedians Eli Matthewson and Courtney Dawson also helped navigate the shifts from literacy to levity, serving as a kind of younger, less muppetey Statler and Waldorf.
"Did you get any NCEA credits?" Matthewson asked Gower after he said he'd taken a high school literacy test.
When they weren't heckling the host, the pair were charged with delivering comedic takes on the news of the day.
Some of the jokes got a little spicy, including some over Tokelau recording its first community case of Covid-19.
"If Tokelau is only finding out about Covid now, then they're going to be really sad in three years when they find out the Queen has died," said Dawson, adding that Covid had earned "a tropical getaway."
"Yeah, I can't wait to see Covid with a tan," quipped Matthewson.
It wasn't long ago that there wasn't a rich vein of comedy in Covid infiltrating a Pacific Island for the first time. Times seem to have changed.
Admittedly international news, with its bounty of horrors, can make for tricky source material.
A local news segment later in the show made for safer and arguably funnier ground.
"It's been a huge week for big nerds because the new budget was announced," said Matthewson, before a montage of politicians calling it a "bread and butter" budget played.
"La de da, someone can afford butter," said Dawson.
Gower told Mediawatch a lot of thought had gone into how to mesh together the show's comedic and serious elements.
Its way of weaving serious and comedic elements together within the same segments had not been tried before, and had been a challenging undertaking for the team.
"There's probably no way to put into words how long that took," he said. "The tonal tightrope is something I've got to live on, and I've got my arms out balancing here in the studio."
TVNZ's weekly flagship current affairs show Sunday takes a much more serious tone, but Gower did not think that would work in his show's timeslot.
"This is a way to get people to take their medicine with a bit of sugar I think is the saying. We're competing with the likes of Masterchef Australia and the Celebrity Chase. And we're competing with TikTok and all that sort of stuff."
The show's conceit is that all the stories are based on someone's issues.
So who decides the issues? Are they all just Gower's issues? Or are they decided by a Newshub executive?
"We all decide. Obviously, I've got a massive say. Our executive producer Jon Bridges, has also got a massive say, and so does Todd Simmons, who's one of the bosses at Newshub. We work through them. There'll be all of our issues," he said.
"I think the list of things we're doing will have no great surprises. They're things that are of concern to Kiwis, exactly the same things you get from anybody who wanted to brainstorm - the education system, disparities in the economy, social issues, all of these sorts of things," he said.
"I don't want to give away what we're doing on a media show. That would be absolutely absolutely stupid," he said.
"We've got 20 shows to do this year and there's more than enough issues to keep us going. I did a rough, back-of-the-Weetbix packet estimation that on the issues that I think New Zealand is facing, we could have 17 seasons," he said.
The host is focused on getting "another hoon" for Paddy Gower Has Issues after this year's 20 episodes.
Finding that kind of support for current affairs has been a challenging task in New Zealand lately, with Three's last effort at the genre - Third Degree - going off-air seven years ago.
Newsrooms are if anything more scarcely resourced now, and Mediawatch understands Newshub reporters are being diverted from their day jobs to provide content for Paddy Gower Has Issues.
Despite the difficulties, Gower is optimistic.
"They are tough to make, but for me the chance to bring it back to TV3 was one of the main motivators," he said. "We have to get this stuff back out there.
"It's not just for Three. It's not just for me. It's for the people that are out there.
"We've got one year to make it work and show the bosses that people want to watch it, and it's my job now to make something good enough so that we can come back for another year with these kinds of stories."
