Calvin Tuteao as Kawa Nights In the Gardens of Spain 8.30pm, Sunday 23rd January, TVONE If your chosen art-form is the television commercial with its glossy styles, it's implausible luxury settings, paint-by-numbers characters, its elevated music and packaged situations, you'll probably going to like this TVONE Sunday Theatre presentation – but as a devoted commercial-viewer you're going to find it way, way too long, but then I suspect anyone would... Nights In The Gardens of Spain is a TVNZ drama, based, well sort of, on novelist Witi Ihimaera's 1995 book of the same name. The novel is one of Ihimaera's better works. It was written prior to Ihimarera's most recent cut-and-paste later style which was revealed, notoriously, in his 2009 fiction The Trowenna Sea, where the plagiarism of uncredited sources was taken to a level we are more accustomed to finding in the work submitted by students who have an approaching deadline but few thoughts. Nights In The Gardens of Spain is a book about a pakeha university lecturer, married with children, who compulsively cruises saunas, and who is in the middle of a protracted and anguished coming-out process, considerably spurred along by events. But forget the book because this television adaptation certainly does. Ihimaera's upper middle-class pakeha family is converted into a Maori whanau in an act of breath-taking cultural audacity – and for absolutely no relevant reason that one can suggest. The PR says that the drama has been given ‘a modern Maori twist', but did it need it and did the results justify the decision? If the reverse had happened, say Ihimaera's The Whale Rider being converted to a TV drama about a rich pakeha family living in a mansion on Waiheke with their holiday adventures befriending a dolphin, you can imagine the local outrage. And somehow one is sure the makers of TV One's Nights in the Gardens of Spain would definitely be in the vocal queue to comment upon that particular travesty. Yet this adaptation does the exact equivalent. Pakeha taonga are not valued here. Cue up a major change in the race of the book's characters, an intrusive and slushy soundtrack of waiata-via-Enya, add a few subtitled scenes with an unconvincingly rhythmed te reo, throw in a few ‘bros', and Ihimaera's novel of pakeha attitudes and life becomes bit of Maori-motifed tea-towel kitsch where no stereotype is left unturned. And, despite the unending anguish about sexual identity, which after all is the basic plot here, the gay aspects of the TV drama are even less convincing. One of the strong points of Ihimaera's book was its fairly accurate portrayal of gay life in the saunas of a recognisable Auckland, but this baby has been thrown out too, along with the pakeha bath-water. The major expressions of gay life in this TV adaptation are an overly art-directed (“More blue gels, please!”) pair of sauna scenes, an even less convincing and over-lengthy exposition of the title of the drama over a few theatrical drinks, and the brief moments we get to spend with the lead character, Kawa, and his lover, Chris played by Dean O'Gorman. So somehow, like Kawa's family, we remain unconvinced of his gayness. One male-to-male kiss does not a gay summer make, and what looks like to be yet another in the string of anguished movie blow-jobs doesn't tend to affirm much. The glimpses of social gay existence we get are nearly cartoonish, although somehow you do want K Road to look that noir-ish in real life, just as you'd like a sauna to be that blue-lit and that magazine-advertisement glossy. But when Kawa tells his wife that he's gay, she vomits, which somehow sums the politics of the piece. O'Gorman is one of the few convincing actors in the drama, but his role is truncated in favour of ever more indigenous angst. He's fun, likable and sympathetic. Calvin Tuteao, as Kawa, has a vital role, but too often he is submerged in the sort of one-dimensional acting that is more grimaced than nuanced- and one does want to like him, he's got that sort of face. And when he is occasionally allowed to come to life, he's good. Nathalie Boltt as Calvin's wife, Annabelle is much more serviceable in her role, but we do want less of the gloss and more of the grit. She does wear sun-glasses well though. On the whole though, you'd have to say ‘No'. This drama doesn't really work despite the camera-moves and the polishing of the scenery. It was a misguided adaptation from the start that sacrificed an interesting story to some sort of weird hybrid of ‘local content', an out-dated racial political agenda, and a real-estate commercial. It also struggles to fill in its allotted minutes, and there is ever more filler. This is inexcusable. At more than one moment, I found myself staring blankly at the screen and looking at some sort of montage more suited to a motivational CD or an overly-budgeted TV spot for an erectile dysfunction remedy. Turn the sound down and you'd have pretty pictures, which is always good, but you can't help but feel that the number of misguided decisions taken in the making of this particular drama are more than we can accept. And the reasons why they were made are probably even less acceptable. http://tvnz.co.nz/sunday-theatre/doc-martin-2460191 David Herkt - 22nd January 2011