I kept putting off writing a review of this series until I'd seen enough episodes to really have a fix on it, but it's on Thursday nights here, and for some reason Thursday is my disaster day, where anything I had planned to do will inevitably not happen. So I have curbed by review a bit in light of a fairly limited exposure to the series.
Frankly I expected this to be rubbish, considering most of what this station screens in the way of teen-oriented animation. However nothing I watched of it has fallen in a heap, though I was constantly expecting it to. Quite the contrary. It was often pleasantly surprising.
It is distinctively New Zealand, simply because, where the hell else could it be from? It's like 'South Park' meets 'Once Were Warriors'. Pleasingly, it's not filled with cheap gross-out, cynical humour (well not always), but is sometimes almost sentimental (though it's a sentimentality buried in layers of street cynicism).
The characters are all Polynesian/Samoan or Chinese (at least in the eps I've seen), and the mentality of the show is emphatically working class. That's a crucial difference between this and, for example, The Simpsons. It has more in common with the UK's 'Bromwell High' in some respects, though it's not as flat-out ruthless as that show.
I suspect this show will eventually make it across to the US, and IMO it's certainly worth a watch. I wish I had seen more of it, to give it a more articulate review - but I wanted to register a rating for it, at very least. That rating is tentative. It may very well be worth three stars. If I get to see repeats, I'll come back and adjust this review.
They'll just need to play it some other time than Thursday night.
/ 2 reviews)
Reviews for Bro' Town
