Yes. Is my quick answer.

But, (this is how I start my long answer) which TVNZ shows are we going to see this in? Mucking In? The motorsport show on Sunday afternoons?

TVNZ doesn't seem to have many other shows that it could put good bicultural aspects into. I agree that Shortland St (when I used to watch it) was always very good at being bicultural without being tokenistic.

I read this recently about the new TV season in the states and discovered that there is a term for the type of character I hate in TV and movies: The Magical Negro.

__...the pilot had a serious case of Magical Negro Syndrome. They seem to be implying that the black character does, indeed, know more than he's letting on ... but please note I am able to type "The black character" and not only do you know who I'm talking about if you've seen the show, you know who I'm talking about even if you haven't seen the show, but have seen any television in the last 20 years__

We haven't been guilty of this in NZ, at least that I can recall. But it is this kind of thing that I would be worried about if we started calling for shows to be more bicultural.

I can just imagine TV executives saying something like: good script, can you put a Maori in there somewhere?

So I would love to see more bi/multiculturalism but I just dread what might be.

And yes we should stop Coro St (it bumped the netball!) but you might have to wait for a generation or two, otherwise: riots.

The new and improved official Shortland Street website has an interesting column written by producer Jason Daniel on the subject of the cultural mix of characters.

He says:

This year we've been (somewhat tastelessly) accused of "ethnic cleansing" because Tama, Shannon, Li Mei and Huia all left the show. But five years ago when I created the Hudson family - the first complete Maori family on the show - there were outcries about "the browning of Shortland Street". So sometimes you just can't win.

<< I can just imagine TV executives saying something like: good script, can you put a Maori in there somewhere?>>

Actually - this happens in children's programming a lot.
Although I remember a kids' show I used to work on, way way back in the early 90s at TV3, which had 3 polynesian or Maori presenters, and the network felt it was "too brown".

Yeah, I think that's what we've got to get past. Biculturalism in TV doesn't just mean "brown characters" or a good mix of brown and white. It means having characters who freely and easily particpate in the customs* of other cultures. There's bound to be an example, but I can't think of one.

*I want a better word but can't think of one, jeez 3.30 Friday arvo and my brain takes off for drinks early

Wow - Daniel also says this on his column.

Viewers often wonder why we don't have more Indian or Chinese characters, but there are very few Chinese or Indian actors in NZ.

What a load of crap. By the way, they lost Pua Magasiva as well as half the Maori and Li-Mei in that fateful few months... And it's a bit rich of him to take credit for the Hudson family.

Here's my original tasteless column from July by the way, now lost to the archiving whims of stuff.co.nz... I'd put it behind a cut but I don't know if it's supported:

Shortland Street's ethnic cleansing is a relief to us all

Shortland Street finally lived up to its medical credentials this week, taking responsibility for showing the nation what the real human effects of a pandemic will be.

Key Health Message: Pandemics only kill Asians. Because that's where pandemics come from.

In fact, Asians can only die from pandemics. It is the only way you can get rid of them when you have exhausted all the other crappy "Asian'' plotlines.

Growing up surrounded by that generational cluster of Commonwealth migrant doctors (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, Sri Lanka), I assumed when I was a child that all doctors were some kind of "Asian'', and that all "Asian'' grown-ups were doctors. That early impression wasn't too far off the mark. In 2001, Chinese people made up about 3% of the population and Indians 2%, a quick scan of the New Zealand Medical Register comes up with 37 Dr Patels, 35 Dr Singhs, 69 Dr Wongs and 44 Dr Lees, compared with 82 Dr Smiths, 38 Dr Joneses and 37 Dr Browns. Oh yes, and 19 Dr Chens but only two Dr Warners. Despite this demographic dominance in medicine, we've only had four core-cast "Asian'' doctors ever in 14 years of our "national soap opera'' (and equally preposterously, no South Africans).

The Shortland Street "Asian'' groundbreaker was Dr Grace Kwan, whose only ethnicity was an Australian accent. Hey, at least her character wasn't a joke at our expense. During the height of the "Asian Invasion'' years, Mac Jeffrey Ong played a convincingly urbane and linguistically realistic ethnic Chinese international student from the Philippines, who taught Rachel McKenna quantum physics, but never got to pash her even though he was a hottie. I missed most of Jacob Rajan as Dr Ashwan Bashar (did he get to pash anyone?). Then, as Shortland Street's "conscience of liberal New Zealand'' years gave way to high camp, we had hospital CEO Sofia "I worked my way up from thee slums of Maneela!'' Martinez, who was as good as a sexually rapacious Joan Collins-meets-Asian capitalist dragon-lady stereotype could get.

But with the advent of Dr Li-Mei Chen, I lost all hope.

Our Li-Mei was always a surly bitchface -- you would be too if you had suffered the indignities heaped upon her character, shoddily cobbled together as she was out of the most hare-brained and mutually contradictory stereotypes possible. They scripted her lines in broken English, then suddenly switched her to a perfect Kiwi accent, and humiliatingly for everyone involved, had her played by a non-Mandarin speaking actress who was occasionally forced to speak Mandarin really badly. Most nonsensically (there is a difference between reversing stereotypes and having no understanding of reality), they made her harp on about her
"third-world peasant'' upbringing and lumbered her with (groan) an arranged marriage, despite this being a virtually impossible class background for one of China's modern-day international student urbanites. Predictably, they made her run a phone-sex hotline and prostitute herself for money and power, while simultaneously making her an ice-queen obsessed with studying. "Try not to make me look like a hooker,'' Li-Mei said in one of her last sick-bed scenes, her most brilliantly self-referential line. Too late.

At least now she has been put out of her misery.

With a producer whose first move on the job was to eliminate the show's Maori/cultural adviser, and whose most recent overhauls have been to get rid of Li-Mei and axe an accumulating number of Maori characters to match the disappearance of the only Pacific Islander, it's no wonder Li Mei has been humiliated since inception.

The writers didn't know any actual Chinese people to ask about suitable names for her character, so they just combined the names of the actress who played her, and that of the Chinese doctor from ER. They called her mother Gong after Gong Li, and her fiance Chow after Chow Yun Fat. I wish I was making this up.

Forget transcending stereotypical plotlines -- if writers can't come up with a name for an ethnic minority character without descending into farce, then perhaps it's for the best that they are ethnically cleansing the cast in preparation for never having anyone on Shortland Street again who isn't white. It might be a relief for us as well.

Who needs to be embarrassed within the national imaginary when one can just secede from it? Who cares about Shortland Street's own humiliated Chinese international student anymore when Chinese international students are -- wait for it -- producing their own soap opera? From the preview I've seen of the long-awaited Sunshine Beyond the Rain, it looks like an impressively professional production, sentimental and romantically tortured in the style of most Chinese soaps. Best of all, it features Chinese international students doing slightly more realistic things in Auckland than Li-Mei: hanging out in pool halls, smoking cigarettes, speaking Mandarin fluently and sleeping with each other rather than with no Chinese people.

RIP Dr Chen -- your time was well and truly up.

We haven't been guilty of this in NZ, at least that I can recall.

How about The Kid in Came a Hot Friday? He was certainly magical on some level (and it wast just Billy T.'s performance...)

OK, that was mostly a joke. I think we do tend to have a much stronger tradition of this in our literature than our TV and film, though. If I can figure out what happened to my library, I'll post a few examples.

How about The Kid in Came a Hot Friday?

Good point. I was just thinking TV and completely forgot about film.

I missed the Margret Mahy series recently but I did catch some. It seemed to be quite nicely put together. White folk, brown folk sometimes speaking Maori (mostly speaking English), all together on some sort of quest* to save their nation.

Was it any good?

*just remembered it was called Maddigan's Quest

Jason Daniel ran the writers' workshop which led to the 'refreshing' of Shortland Street in 2000.

An integral outcome of this process was the introduction of the Hudson family.

So yes, Jason can take the credit for the introduction of the Hudsons to Shortland Street.

If it's going to be done, it needs to be done right. I think that's just a matter of wanting to be certain that the work you're doing has meaning and depth.

I don't think that drive comes from a desire to uphold the principles of the treaty, or please a funding or commissioning body that is looking for specific boxes to be ticked.

So basically: if thinking about biculturalism adds to the creative process, and is something that inspires us to deal with stories that are meaningful then great, but if it becomes just another hoop that we have to jump through, that's not so good, so we have to be careful about it...

Nice to see that scorching post again Tze Ming. Still, an Asian horse has just won the Melbourne Cup for the first time, which might be a small win for diversity.

Did his trainer tell him he was a good horse in Japanese? A horse that understands Japanese. Cool.

But seriously, waddaya reckon of the Chinese family in Outrageous Fortune? Have the former Shorty writers there got it right second time?

And I think one real innovation relevant to the topic was the introduction of the first big-time Pacific Island characters early on. It happened against a backdrop of urban cultural emergence for a generation of PI kids, and I think it had a resonance because of that. It's funny that Samoans, who now top charts and appear in top-rating shows, were largely invisible in the media up till then.