Culture 101

Karl Puschmann joins Perlina with his November TV picks. He starts with It Gets Worse, out on Neon and narrated by Zadie Smith. Three university friends in their twenties face eviction in London, and a hole one of them punches in the wall sets off the trouble. Karl calls it sharp and very funny, with plenty of cringe, and gives a content warning because sex is a big part of the show. Dead Ahead season two starts from 3 November, and Karl says the first episode is a cracking start. Miriama Smith plays a high-powered Maori lawyer whose ancestors come back to guide her, and Karl says it works like The Sixth Sense without the jump scares. Stick season two arrives on Apple TV on 4 November, and Karl says it has eased off the heavy-handed drama and gone back to the golf. Later in the month, Yellowjackets' final season arrives on 21 November, Blade Runner 2099 lands on Prime Video on 25 November, and 12 12 12 on Apple TV puts Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan in a European heist.

Painter Shane Cotton and writer Anthony Byrt talk about their book, a mix of history, biography and personal storytelling rather than a conventional art monograph. Byrt quotes his line that Cotton has been walking backwards into his own future for over 30 years. The two met in Brisbane in 2013 and spent the next decade in conversation, including at Cotton's studio in Palmerston North. Cotton grew up in Upper Hutt, drove trucks for his dad, and then went to art school in Christchurch, to the surprise of his family. He talks about his recurring image of preserved heads, and says there is something unsettled about them.

Kate Rodger reviews Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim and released by A24, which stars Robert Pattinson and Skyler Gisondo in an unauthorised biopic about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator. Pressure, directed by Anthony Maras, stars Brendan Fraser as General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Andrew Scott as meteorologist James Stagg, who is asked to forecast the weather for D-Day. Black Sheeps is the sequel to the 2006 New Zealand horror-comedy Black Sheep, with Nathan Meister returning as Henry.

Tongan and Scottish artist Benjamin Work talks about his Pacific Contemporary Artist Award, presented at the 30th Arts Pasifika Awards in Tamaki Makaurau, which hosted the ceremony for the first time. His Sydney Biennale work uses 30 metal forms based on a Tongan dance paddle, with whalebone inlay. It is linked to an 1863 whaling voyage, when a captain took pacific people and sold them into the Peru slave trade. Benjamin traces the story back to a family question about his great-grandfather's green eyes. He also talks about his first visit to the Venice Biennale.

Arnav Taode, event manager of the Auckland Diwali Festival 2026, speaks to Perlina from the festival. Originally from Pune in India, he grew up moving around the country with his family, which gave him a lifelong interest in Indian arts and culture. He moved to New Zealand in 2014, went to the festival in his first year, and was struck by its scale. He has returned almost every year since, including as a stage designer.

Sarah Ell was a sixth former camping on the shores of Lake Tarawera when she first imagined writing about the eruption. That was 1986, a century after the mountain blew. Forty years on, her story has a cast of visitors gathered at the hotel with lies to tell and plans to carry out. The reader knows what's coming. They don't. At the heart of A Sky Full of Fire is Mohi, a young Tuhourangi boy. Sarah tells Perlina why she couldn't write this book without a Maori voice, and what it meant when a Tuhourangi reader loved it. She also explains why there's always weather in her books.

Kirsten Vangsness was halfway through an ab workout when a distinguished voice across the gym announced that it worshipped at her throne. It was Tim Curry. She went straight to work and burst in on her bosses to tell them he wanted to be on the show. Kirsten has played Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds since 2005, a part she only auditioned for to help a friend in casting look good. She was working three jobs to pay the rent at the time. Twenty seasons later, she still gets excited every time she sees her name on a call sheet. She tells Perlina about the shy kid who stopped talking for a year, and the drama class that showed her where she belonged.

It's Labour Weekend, which in Raglan means the studio doors are open. The Raglan Arts Weekend is in its 16th year, with more than 70 artists inviting thousands of visitors in to see where the work gets made. Co-ordinator Nicky Brzeska joins Perlina to talk about what's on show, from ceramics to taxidermy, and how the weekend makes room for emerging artists alongside the familiar names.

There's a lot more singing in season two of Happiness, and Luke Di Somma is the one writing it. This time the show within the show is a Sherlock Holmes musical. Luke helps run the writers room, so the songs are planned from the ground up rather than dropped in later. TV is tough on a songwriter, though. A stage number can run six minutes. On screen, two minutes is a long song, and a close-up can say what a lyric would. Luke also looks back on a Christchurch childhood with an activity every lunchtime, and years spent as a conductor for hire with theatre companies around the South Island. Some of the people he met there may seem familiar.

Not many people decide to sit down and watch a 40-minute drama on their phone. Plenty of people will watch 40 one-minute episodes, though, one easy decision at a time. That's the hook behind micro-dramas, the vertical, cliffhanger-loaded soaps turning up in social media feeds, more and more of them made with AI. University of Auckland business lecturer Johnny Chan has been studying why they're so hard to put down. He's never watched one for fun, and after his research, he probably won't. In China, 850 million people do. Johnny walks Perlina through how a typical storyline keeps twisting to hold you, and why he worries about a generation that can't sit with anything longer than two minutes.