Something to watch tonight: Friday 16 January
Tangata Pai (McNaughton, 2025)
At various social occasions over the summer break I was asked what I’d been watching recently and what I would recommend.
This is a better question to ask me than “What was the best film of the year?” or worse, “What’s your favourite film?” I find most of what I watch only stays in my noggin long enough to write one of these newsletters or talk about them with Emile D on the radio on a Friday night. If it wasn’t for the archives here and at the old place, or my Letterboxd account, I wouldn’t be able to come up with any kind of summary of the year for RNZ.
But throw in the word “recently” and there’s a chance I might be able to come up with something and the show that I wanted to tell people about this summer was a local one — a brilliantly conceived social drama called Tangata Pai.
Set in present day New Plymouth — a town the editor-in-chief and I are very fond of — the show centres on a Māori occupation of Puke Ariki. Not the library/museum but the land in front of it. They are protesting a government proposal to open up land that’s under claim so that it can be mined for lucrative rare earth metals. The government says the industry will bring jobs. Māori say that it will destroy ecologically and spiritually important sites.
And so there’s a multi-generational, peaceful protest which, very early in episode one, is tragically disrupted by a bomb explosion. The show then takes us back in time to show multiple characters in the immediate lead up to the tragedy — the hour before, in fact, with some further back flashbacks fleshing out the tangled character relationships.
There are five central characters, all of whom have some kind of connection to the protest. Nicola Kawana plays a politician trying to reconcile her professional need to defend the mining plan with her family connections to many of the protestors. Ariana Osborne is a young pop star on a journey to discover a Māori heritage that had been kept from her by a Pākehā solo mum. Yoson An is a young Chinese-New Zealander struggling to make a career in the police after a traumatic event. Shavaughn Ruakare is a nurse at the town’s hospital and Jayden Daniels plays a young father at the protest whose mental health is starting to unravel.
Each episode looks at roughly a single fifteen-minute period from the different perspectives presented by these characters as the ticking clock takes us closer and closer to the fateful moment.
Along the way, we see how the lives of each of them interconnect, sometimes getting the same scene repeated from a different character’s perspective. And we also realise how each of are bundles of multiple identities, roles and responsibilities, many of those identities proving difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.
Saying that Tangata Pai is a snapshot of New Zealand in 2025 feels a bit trite, as if it is trying to tick the boxes of a list of issues facing the country — youth suicide, racism, inequality, ecological degradation, even the Covid divide gets a look in — but the characters are so rich and recognisable that it all feels organic.
My main criticism is that the budget looks a little threadbare and doesn’t quite measure up to the ambition of the storytelling. There should be more people in the crowd scenes and New Plymouth hospital looks like the quietest in the country even before it gets evacuated.
But when it works — like a dazzling scene in the hospital carpark in, I think, episode four — Tangata Pai is very good indeed. TV Three was going through plenty of disruption during the period Tangata Pai was in production. It was sold to Sky TV for only a dollar back in July and by September, when the show went to air, there didn’t seem to be the resource or the stomach for a big marketing campaign, meaning it didn’t get the audience or the discussion it deserved.
I hope I’ve encouraged you to check it out.
Where to watch Tangata Pai
Aotearoa: Streaming on ThreeNow
Rest of the world: Not currently available (but we can hope)