WELLINGTON PARANORMAL
Created by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, “Wellington Paranormal” is a New Zeland mockumentary comedy horror television series and a spin-off of the 2014 film What We Do in the Shadows, starring Mike Minogue, Karen O’Leary, and Maaka Pohatu, the first season of which aired in New Zeland on July 11, 2018, on TVNZ 2.
The First Season of the show premiered three years later in the US on Sunday, July 11, 2021, at 9:00 P.M on CW and consequently on HBO Max and follows members of the Wellington, New Zealand, police, Sergeant Maaka, and Officers Minogue and O’Leary whose job is to investigate paranormal phenomena.
“The way that the characters react to things are quite New Zealand, the way that people either are understated or they don’t know what to do,” Clement said with a laugh in an interview with The Associated Press via Zoom from Wellington.
Clement isn’t worried about the jokes getting lost between hemispheres.
“We try to cram it with jokes so that you won’t really notice if you don’t get a specific cultural reference,” he said.
A more significant difference may be the countries’ police cultures and the prevailing attitudes around them.
“I know that this comes at an odd time for America and the image of police in America,” Clement said. “There’s a different feeling around the police here. There’s some crossover and some of the same issues, but because they don’t carry guns, there is not the fear of the police.”
And some of the jokes might play a little differently in 2021 after major U.S. protests of police violence than they did in 2018 when the first season of “Wellington Paranormal” was made.
In one episode, Minogue has blood all over his police uniform after trying to empty a pint into an evidence bag.
“I didn’t brutalize anybody!” he feels the need to tell the people who see him.
“There’s a few jokes like that that we did three years ago that I wonder if we could make today because it’s changed so quickly,” Clement said. “I hope people still find that funny, but it feels more probably on the nose than it was at the time.”
WHERE CAN I WATCH “WELLINGTON PARANORMAL”?
Exclusively available for streaming on TVNZ 2, SBS, The CW, and HBO Max.