New to TVNZ OnDemand in September

September 1, 2020 0 Comments

A new Australian drama series from A Place to Call Home creator Bevan Lee will stream from September 23 on TVNZ OnDemand.

Between Two Worlds stars Cold Feet’s Hermione Norris as the unhappy wife of a business tycoon who needs a heart transplant and Kiwi Sara Wiseman as the widowed mother of his likely donor: a young football star who’s been left brain dead after an assault.

The Medium is Not Enough called it an “intense, high concept melodrama … If you like nonsense melodramas, you might enjoy Between Two Worlds, but you really have to like them.”

Apparently, not enough Australians did. The second episode shed a third of the premiere’s viewership when it distantly trailed 60 Minutes and Vera in metro viewers last month.

Also from Australia comes the full season of Upright (September 18), an acclaimed comedy about the black sheep of a family (Tim Minchin) who meets a teenage runaway (Milly Alcock) en route to visit his dying mother with an upright piano in tow.

“With a light touch and electric performances, the series marries melancholy with comedy to deliver an odd-couple narrative that goes beyond the norm,” The Guardian said.

Premiering as a box set on Thursday will be The Deceived, an Irish drama about an English student who moves in with her charismatic lecturer after his wife dies in suspicious circumstances.

“That Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee’s latest project is different from her Northern Ireland-set comedy is an understatement,” Radio Times said.

“The Deceived is a dark thriller that promises to shine light on gaslighting while paying homage to gothic classics, featuring a manor house haunted by a dead wife and mysterious knocks from behind locked doors.”

Back for a second season will be Kiwi comedy Educators. Episodes one and two will drop on September 30, with the the rest of the season streaming weekly thereafter.

TVNZ OnDemand also will showcase Maori Language Week from September 14 with a new season of bilingual drama Ahikāroa and the premieres of The Ring Inz, a comedy-drama about competitive kappa haka, and Kairākau, which is billed as “Te Ao Māori meets ’70s kung fu movies”.

And Kaupapa Kori will mix energetic bop tracks to hip hop and trap beats to normalise te reo Māori; each waiata is accompanied by choreographed dance routines

The rest of this month’s newcomers will include the tourism-themed From The Vault: Don’t Leave Home (September 1), S3 of AP Bio (September 4), S1 of The World’s Deadliest (September 6), and Taskmaster UK S1-7 (September 6, ahead of the NZ version’s broadcasts premiere and following The CW network’s pulling of the original after just one episode last month).

New to the branded channels from today will be:

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