Melody Rules screeenshot (You Tube) Photo: You Tube
The homegrown TV comedy 'Melody Rules' came out on TV3 in the 1990s and has been described as one of the worst sitcoms ever made. The critics panned it, calling it cringeworthy, atrocious, awful, and a disaster in reviews, and the whole experience proved so traumatic that some actors fled overseas to escape the embarrassment!
Now 'Melody Rules' gets a post mortem 25 years on with one of the show's original writers. In 'The Worst Sitcom Ever Made', Geoff Houtman tracks down more than 20 of the cast and crew to find out where it all went wrong and how the failure's been affecting them since
The story started off at a comedy writers' workshop in Auckland: a group of 120 budding writers paid to listen to a visiting American expert, and do some writing workshops. Their mission was simple - write the great New Zealand sitcom! And if that task seemed too easy, the organisers threw in a plot twist: a Survivor-style elimination contest between the writers.
'The Worst Sitcom Ever Made' is presented by Geoff Houtman and produced for RNZ by The Downlow Concept and Glynis Stuart.
And you can listen to the show on RNZ's Nights after the 9pm news each Wednesday for the next 8 weeks from Wednesday 13th March, at rnz.co.nz, or wherever you get your podcasts if you search for 'The Worst Sitcom Ever Made'.
