Heather du Plessis-Allan: Was saving Shortland Street the right thing to do?

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

Reluctantly, I think saving Shortland Street was the right thing for now.

The news on Shorty today is that it’s been saved, but it will go down to three episodes a week.

What's saved it is taxpayer money: $3 million from NZ On Air and then be eligible for a rebate from the Screen Production Grant which must be about $6 or $7 million.

Which means we’re pumping in around about $10 million in taxpayer money to save a soap opera.

I'm reluctant about this because I generally don't think we should prop up failing businesses. If they can’t make a buck it’s because not enough people like the product,

in which case it should be allowed to die.

But... I think there’s an exception this time.

Because it might just be possible that Shorty may be able to pay its own way again... maybe.

The reason I say that is because it’s not that Shorty is unpopular, it actually has a lot of people watching.

The last figures that I can find are from last year, 79K people in their key demographic watched it on TV2, which doesn’t sound that impressive, but then you add in the streaming numbers of TVNZ+: 455K a week.

And well, that is impressive.

By comparison, at the same time TVNZ News only earned 180K streams, even though the news has got two extra episodes a week, Shorty was beating it by 2.5 times.

The problem isn’t that it’s unpopular.

The problem is that TVNZ hasn’t figured out how to actually make enough money from the people watching it on TVNZ+. It knows how to get money from TV2 ads, but it doesn’t know how to properly monetise online yet.

So... Shorty street is only guaranteed for another year.

I dunno if that's enough time for TVNZ to figure out how to earn more money on the app, but I hope it does.

Because it would be a pity to lose a show that is still watched by that many kiwis, and that has trained some of our best acting talent: Temuera Morrison, KJ Apa, Thomasin McKenzie, Craig Parker, Martin Henderson, Robyn Malcolm.

And which is, frankly, is one of the few shows left actually reflecting us back to ourselves.

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