Twenty years ago this week, New Zealand television's most famous family stormed onto our screens in a flurry of skin, sex and swearing. Tara Ward goes back to where it all began.

The Spinoff

06-07-2025

Rachel Lang was listening to National Radio in the shower one morning in 2003 when a news report came over the airwaves that left her stunned. It revealed that the median income for women in Aotearoa was just over $14,000 a year, a figure so depressingly low that she found it hard to believe.
It was also just one more shocking story in a string of strange headlines that had captured Lang's attention. Whether it was a police officer who became engaged to a pornographer or a Christchurch man selling penis-expanding cream on the internet, it seemed to Lang that the world had turned upside down. Suddenly, anything was possible, everyone wanted their five minutes of fame, and the gap between legality and morality felt wider than ever before.
Still, it was the news that many New Zealand women were only earning a paltry $14,000 a year that remained most mind boggling for Lang. If that was all you got for being an honest member of society, she wondered, why don't more women just turn to crime?
At this point, Lang was one of New Zealand's leading television industry talents, having created and written for television shows like Jackson's Wharf, Lawless, Shortland Street and City Life. In 2003, her most recent television project was Mercy Peak, a drama she co-created with Gavin Strawhan about a city doctor (played by Sara Wiseman) who uproots herself and moves to small-town New Zealand.
Mercy Peak was a gentle drama with a loyal audience, but Lang found it still couldn't cut through the nation's cultural cringe. Whenever she told people what she did for a living, she always encountered the same perplexing response. 'They'd say, 'have you written anything I might have seen?' I'd say a name, and they'd go, 'oh, I don't really watch New Zealand television'.' More infuriatingly, a TVNZ executive told Lang that Mercy Peak represented 'all that was wrong with New Zealand drama'. How so? 'They felt it was too middle class and polite,' Lang remembers.
When Mercy Peak was cancelled in 2003 after three seasons and 60 episodes, Lang was more frustrated than ever. She wondered why she bothered making respectable TV shows if they didn't earn her the favour of the executives or the public. She vowed her next show would be everything that Mercy Peak was not: loud, audacious, impossible to ignore. Outrageous, even.
Out of the shower and into the sump of Lang's creative mind emerged an idea like no other: an upside down morality tale where the matriarch of a crime family would go straight, despite the protests of her criminal offspring.
In the mid-2000s, the New Zealand television industry was full of confidence. There were 372 hours of local drama on our screens in 2003, Shortland Street had been on for over a decade, and Māori Television launched in 2004. Shows like bro'Town, The Strip, Street Legal and The Insider's Guide to Happiness were impressing viewers. Whale Rider was released in 2002, Sione's Wedding would delight audiences in 2006. 'It was a very prolific time for South Pacific Pictures,' remembers Simon Bennett, who was head of drama at the local production company at the time.
And in an era long before on-demand streaming, New Zealanders loved broadcast television. Nearly one million of us tuned in to Coronation Street in 2003, while TV3's listings were dominated by high-rating crime shows like CSI and NCIS. Despite the reliance on American franchises, the channel wasn't afraid to take big risks locally. TV writer James Griffin remembers TV3 director of programming Kelly Martin telling him to bring her the stuff she couldn't buy anywhere else.
'It turned out the thing that you couldn't buy was a series about a New Zealand family.'
Lang teamed up with her Mercy Peak colleague Griffin to develop her crime-family-gone-good concept into a short proposal for a one-hour comedy-drama series called White Trash. 'Cheryl West is a woman with standards, and yes, values,' their pitch began, and promised bold characters, high stakes and comedy – and quite a lot of sex. The tension would be driven by Cheryl's sudden, life-changing decision to turn away from crime, and the opposition of her husband and their four headstrong children. 'How does a one-family crime wave, with a proud tradition, change the habits of a lifetime?' the pitch asked.
'How does a one-family crime wave, with a proud tradition, change the habits of a lifetime?'
They knew the central idea of Cheryl trying to make an honest living was rich with dramatic potential. 'It kept generating ideas and characters that were really strong,' Lang remembers. They wanted to weave in storylines from real New Zealand – racism, prejudice, poverty and crime – without weighing the show down in intense, social realism. 'There were lots of social issues that were good story material, and you could do them as comedy and tragedy,' says Lang. 'It was a great way of being political, without looking like you were.'
Lang chose the name West in tribute to the family's Auckland location, but it was also a reference to Britain's most outrageous suburban serial killers, Fred and Rosemary. Despite the TVNZ executive's disdain for Mercy Peak, Lang was particularly fond of the show's own white trash family called the Van der Velters. They were a working class family from the wrong side of the tracks who got into all sorts of mischief, and Lang had often thought they'd make a good show of their own. Anthony Starr played one of the Van der Velter sons.
With these details in mind, the Wests sprang to life on the page. Cheryl, 40ish, 'believes in regular carpet cleaning and the benefits of aromatherapy', while Wolfgang, 39, is 'dynamite with the ladies'. There's mention of Cheryl's leopardskin pants, of 17-year-old Pascalle's love of Rachel Hunter, and the 'shrewd and acerbic' Loretta, aged 14. The proposal is similar to what we would eventually see on screen in 2005, although Sergeant Judd was originally named Budd and there's no mention of Munter. West brothers Jethro and Van, however, are identical 'in everything other than brains'.
It was a uniquely New Zealand pitch with a fierce, flawed female at its centre. There was nothing aspirational about White Trash, nor was it trying to emulate any other British or American television drama. It was unusually, distinctly us. 'The Wests may not be ordinary, but they don't see themselves as different to other people,' the proposal reads. 'They have hopes and dreams and values, the same ones as Peter Dunne and Winston Peters, in fact.'
John Barnett was the CEO of production company South Pacific Pictures in 2004. Back then, SPP would receive between 300 and 400 TV pitches a year. Of those several hundred, they would choose eight or so for development, with only one or two being made into a series. Barnett had worked with Griffin and Lang before, and knew their reputation for delivering quality, well-written television. 'She certainly read the room,' Barnett recalls of Lang's original idea. 'We looked at it pretty much straight away and said, 'yep, let's give it a go'.'
The proposal was given the placeholder name of Outrageous Fortune (referencing 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' from Hamlet), TV3 commissioned the show and New Zealand On Air agreed to fund 13 episodes. 'TV3 at the time was much more robust,' Barnett recalls, adding that Caterina De Nave – TV3's head of drama and comedy – was hooked by Outrageous. De Nave was a tireless champion of New Zealand television for 40 years who died in 2014, and she encouraged the writers to take huge risks from the very start.
A Sunday Star Times headline in September 2004 announced ' Green Light for Kiwi Version of Sopranos '. The series was scheduled for 9.30pm, a dreaded 'nowhere, let's forget you' timeslot, according to Lang, when most New Zealanders were headed to bed. Still, it was a commission, and 9.30pm was outside the watershed timeslot, which meant the scripts could be filled with sex and swearing.
In fact, that later timeslot gave Lang and Griffin the freedom to see how far they could push New Zealand sensibilities. 'Until then in New Zealand drama, when people had a dispute, they sat down over a cup of tea and sorted it out,' Griffin says. 'We went, why can't they be in bed screwing, while they're sorting it out?'' Lang says their first rule was that while there wouldn't be much violence on Outrageous, there would always be sex in the first act, as a way of shamelessly cutting through New Zealand's cultural cringe.
Lang and Griffin outlined the season one episodes together, and while Lang was overseas temporarily, Griffin began to write the pilot. 'First episodes are a pain in the arse, but I still think it's one of the best I've done,' he says. His first draft featured Loretta narrating the episode to introduce the West family, and Chris Knox animations that explained the intricacies of Van's brain ('boobs and other things'). De Nave wasn't a fan. 'She went, 'This is you just being writer wanky. Cut it back,'' Griffin remembers. He took her advice and played the drama straight, as it were.
They also tinkered with the show title. Griffin gave every episode a subtitle from Hamlet, as both he and Lang felt there was something Shakespearean about the way the writing shifted between high comedy and high tragedy. When the network decided Outrageous Fortune was too fancy a name, the pair spent weeks coming up with alternatives, only for a network focus group to decide they liked Outrageous Fortune the best after all.
'Why can't they be in bed screwing, while they're sorting it out?'
In his head, Griffin called the first episode 'Cheryl's Shitty Day'. The entire episode hinged on Cheryl achieving one simple task, which was getting to Jethro's law graduation ceremony. Jethro represented hope for the Wests, but everyone else seemed determined to stuff up Cheryl's plan: Wolf got sent to prison, Grandpa Ted burned his flat down, Van committed a home invasion, Pascalle had a dodgy modelling portfolio and Loretta wagged school. An infuriated Cheryl sat her family down and announced they were out of the crime business for good.
'It was fun to write, and it didn't take long,' says Griffin. 'Once you're on that train, it moves fast.'
In late 2004, Robyn Malcolm, 39, was driving around southern Ireland with her sister and her 10-month-old son Charlie, who was busy crying in the back of the car. Malcolm was trying to decide if she should return to Aotearoa to do a new show about working class Westies, and as the lush, green fields of Ireland whizzed past, she and her sister bounced their thoughts around. Malcolm thought the scripts were 'pretty good', but could she do the job with a one-year-old child? She also wanted to have another baby, would that be possible?
Malcolm decided to give it a shot, and a week or two later, turned up for a meeting at SPP with Charlie in the back seat again. Winning the role of matriarch Cheryl, however, wasn't easy. Griffin says it was clear early on that Malcolm was the one, but it took a total of four auditions to convince the network that she was more than just Shortland Street's Ellen Crozier, a role she had left five years earlier. 'I jumped through a lot of hoops,' Malcolm remembers. 'If you played a role on Shortland Street, then a lot of people weren't sure if you could do anything else. I had to prove and re-prove that I was capable of playing other roles.'
Anthony Starr played Todd Van der Velter on Mercy Peak, and Lang and Griffin wanted him for the dual role of Jethro and Van West. At first, 29-year-old Starr was deemed too old to play the twins (21 in the show), but Lang says she and Griffin pushed hard. 'Only we knew the essence of the characters, what they had to smell like, how they had to react.' Griffin remembers Siobhan Marshall 'wandering in from nowhere' to win the role of Pascalle, while Lang thought Tammy Davis was perfect for lovable rogue Munter, whose friendship with Van gave an unexpected emotional heart to the show.
A 20-year-old Antonia Prebble originally auditioned for Pascalle, but when Lang and Griffin watched her audition tape, they knew she was their Loretta (although Simon Bennett from SPP recalls some discussion about whether Prebble was too well spoken to be a West). Frank Whitten (famous for the Speight's ads) won the role of Grandpa Ted, although Lang says the network wanted to reduce his time on screen. They feared younger viewers would not watch stories about old people, ' even those who like to piss off balconies'.
Wolfgang West was the last character to be cast. De Nave discounted a number of local actors before choosing Auckland-born, Australian actor Grant Bowler, best known here for his role in police drama Blue Heelers. 'It took a long, long time before Grant turned up and encapsulated that simmering masculinity, the clenched jaw anger just below the surface,' says Griffin. Malcolm remembers the moment de Nave met Bowler in person. 'She just looked at him and went, 'oh, you're perfect!' Everyone was like, 'oh my god, who's this big drink of water from Australia?''
Many involved in the series credit Mark Beesely with bringing the vibe of West Auckland to life on Outrageous. Beesley had already captured the Westie sensibility in his 1999 film Savage Honeymoon, a dramatic comedy that also featured a larger-than-life family from West Auckland. As lead director on Outrageous, Beesley worked closely with the cast to help them understand exactly what working class Westies were all about. While Beesley didn't respond to The Spinoff's request to be involved in this story, Griffin remembers his persistent correcting of the cast's cadence. 'Every time they sounded like a nice middle class person from Mount Eden, he'd jump on it and say, 'I don't think this is how they would speak.''
Beesley is also credited with understanding how critical the tone of Outrageous was. It needed to always feel authentic, so the drama could move convincingly between being deeply moving and deeply funny. Prebble remembers Beesley telling her and Marshall to visit West Auckland supermarkets to observe Westies in their natural habitat. (Marshall also had a Westie boyfriend at the time, who coached her on how to swear properly.)
Most importantly, the characters never beat around the bush, they always spoke directly and only smiled when something was funny. 'He said, 'These people don't smile. They don't apologise for who they are. They don't need to be liked. Cheryl will never, ever, ever ask anyone to like her,'' remembers Malcolm. 'That was probably the best note I ever got.'
The cast had two weeks to rehearse before filming began, which they spent developing the nuances of the Wests. Beesley encouraged Malcolm and Bowler to become physically comfortable together by dancing to Guns N' Roses' 'Sweet Child of Mine', while the rest of the cast bonded by hanging out on the set of the West house. 'We did a lot of jumping on the couch and the furniture, and working out whose chair was whose at the dinner table,' Prebble says. 'It was really important that we had a sense of it being ours.'
Offscreen, the cast gelled as a family too. Malcolm lived in a big house in Devonport that had a huge garden, and she would invite the cast over for home-cooked meals of fish pie. They drank together, lived together and travelled together, forming a tight, protective unit off camera. Once you were in the family, Malcolm says, they all moved as a group. 'We really got on as people, which again, is the casting. We all got it. We all understood our roles, we all understood the tone.'
Filming began in late January 2005, with the first scenes filmed in Jethro's office for episodes three and four. From the outset, Outrageous felt different to other local dramas. The crew shot with two handheld cameras, which gave a sense of fluidity and allowed them to move freely through the scene to capture the immediate reactions of the actors. Bennett – who joined the show as a director from season two – says this gave Outrageous a playfulness that hadn't been seen in New Zealand scripted drama before.
'We all got it. We all understood our roles, we all understood the tone.'
It was also an unusual move to have one actor play two main characters. Every scene involving both Van and Jethro required a blue screen and a body double, which meant it would take twice as long to shoot. Wolf, too, offered some logistical challenges. Lang recalls justifying the Australian-based Bowler's large fees by arguing that because Wolf was in prison for much of the first season, they could block shoot his scenes. They did not, in those early days, consider that Outrageous would last for six seasons.
In fact, few expected Outrageous to go any further than its initial 13 episode run.
At 9.30pm on Tuesday July 12, 2005, Outrageous Fortune stormed onto our screens in a flurry of skin, sex and swearing. Our first glimpse of the Wests was a framed family photo placed on a bedside table, before the camera pulled back to reveal a set of pink manicured nails and a whole lot of nakedness. 'You'll need to sort out that thing with Falani for those mag wheels, and tell Eric to deliver those bloody cases of scotch to that guy,' Wolfgang West instructed his wife, as they lay together in bed. 'Ssh, Wolf, it's all under control,' Cheryl replied. 'Would you shut up and fuck me?'
Outside the West house – a 1970s two storey brick and tile – three police cars raced up the driveway and Mr and Mrs West's early morning to-do list was rudely interrupted by a loud, urgent knocking at the door. 'No, no, not today,' Cheryl groaned, as the guitar twangs from the opening bars of ' Gutter Black ' burst through and the Outrageous Fortune opening credits began.
That first scene immediately set the tone: nothing about this new show would be polite or respectable. 'It was a cheap shot really,' Lang laughs of the sex and nudity in the first scene. 'James and I really just wanted it to work. We wanted to go, 'screw you, look at us'.'
The rest of episode one, titled 'Slings and Arrows', introduced the world of the Wests: the family business that offloaded stolen goods, Wolf's unexpected four-year prison sentence, Cheryl's shock announcement that the family would play it straight. Griffin remembers feeling confident about what they'd made, but he was unsure what the public would think. 'No one jumped up and down and said, this is going to change the landscape of New Zealand television,' he remembers. 'But you're still making it when it goes to air, so you're head down, bum up, and the train keeps rolling.'
Listener TV critic Diana Wichtel reviewed the first few episodes. 'Outrageous Fortune is confirmation, if any were needed, that the national psyche remains in a sad state of disrepair,' she wrote in her review titled 'Those Wild Wests'. Wichtel praised Malcolm's performance and said she would keep watching, but she lamented how the show fell into old traps. 'Outrageous Fortune is not another great leap forward for local TV drama. The sad thing is that it clearly could have been,' she wrote.
'There were certainly some parts of society that didn't take well to it at the beginning, because it didn't portray the picture that people thought New Zealand should,' Griffin remembers. Outrageous captured a different side of Aotearoa: a dodgy working-class family who relied on crime for an income, who made us laugh and who weren't ashamed of where they came from. It was deliberately in your face, and people weren't sure what to make of it.
'There were certainly some parts of society that didn't take well to it.'
Even Malcolm was concerned. She admits that when she watched an early cut of the first completed episodes (episodes three and four), she burst into tears. 'I rang [producer] Mike Smith, and went, 'it's terrible, I hate it.' I just poured all this criticism out.' Later, she realised how wrong she was – 'the two episodes that I cried over are two of my absolute favorites now, but I couldn't see it.'
Wichtel also looks back on those first episodes with a changed perspective. 'The trouble was that Outrageous was a bit different. It was pulling out all the stops in ways that made my head spin,' she says. It took time for her to understand the tone, but as that first season progressed, Wichtel fell in love with the Wests and all their bad behaviour. 'The audacity of what the show was doing took hold, like having the Shakespearean episode titles, being really confident about the characters and taking risks.'
New Zealand's love affair with Outrageous was a slow burn. 'People think of Outrageous as this instant success, and that's just not true,' says Lang. Despite taking time to find its feet, the show won several Qantas Television Awards in its first season, and the network was pleased with its performance. Outrageous was renewed for a second season, where it began to win its timeslot, but it wasn't until New Zealand On Air agreed to fund the season two Christmas special that Griffin felt the show was resonating strongly with audiences.
Off-camera, there was a sense of ownership and protectiveness of Outrageous that was rare in the industry. 'Everyone who worked on the show had a huge level of commitment to it and belief in it, unlike any other show I've worked on,' Bennett remembers. As an executive producer then director, Bennett recalls the core cast as being creatively independent and willful people who wanted to find their own path through each scene. 'It was a bit scary, because if you didn't know the answer to a question, some of those actors would not suffer fools. As a director, I had to be incredibly well prepared and think very quickly on my feet.'
As the seasons progressed, Malcolm admits that the cast's deep belief in the show could make them hard to work with. They were often fierce with new directors ('sometimes justifiably so, sometimes not') and would disagree with the writing team. 'The writers were giving us the story and the voices and we would get quite stroppy back,' Malcolm says. 'It became a robust collaboration. We weren't an easy lot…it just mattered so much.' Griffin also remembers the West energy spilling over into the real world. 'The spirit of the West family infused everyone making it, so that it became fun and nasty and crazy and intense.'
By season three (which featured 22 episodes, an astonishing number by today's standards), Outrageous had become appointment viewing. That season debuted with 465,200 viewers (5+) and a 44.5% share of the 18-49 demographic. It was the show's highest ratings yet, and it would go on to become the third most-watched show of 2007, beaten only by the Rugby World Cup and CSI. Outrageous had shattered the stereotype that New Zealand dramas couldn't rate well with New Zealanders.
The spirit of Outrageous spread far beyond West Auckland. People dressed like Cheryl and had Outrageous-themed parties, quoted Grandpa and debated whether they were Team Wolf or Team Judd. When Michelle Ang (who played Tracy Hong) moved to America, her homesick overseas friends would ask for box sets of Outrageous to be bought over. The show was soon sold overseas and adapted for US and UK audiences. Campbell Live broadcast a special episode from the set of The Rusty Nail, while an Outrageous museum exhibition saw Air New Zealand fly a themed plane of cast and Cheryl lookalikes up to Auckland. By the sixth and final season in 2010, the nation's most popular website Trade Me reported a sharp decline in usage when Outrageous was on.
'We hadn't experienced anything like it as a bunch of actors. I don't think the New Zealand public had either,' Malcolm says. Griffin had spent his career being told he could never make a show where the criminals were the heroes, but the Wests hit a nerve with the public. 'They were outsiders, little Kiwi battlers,' he says. 'They had morals, they had a code, but they didn't obey the law. I think that found a footing in our psyche.'
Undoubtedly, part of the appeal was Cheryl West, the complex, fearless matriarch with a phenomenal sexual appetite, who could be both villain and hero in a single episode. 'The more flawed we made her, the more the audience responded to her,' Malcolm remembers. 'Playing a character like that shows that you can seriously fuck up, but it's what you do afterwards that counts. I loved her for that – and for her taste in footwear.'
Wichtel spent six seasons of Outrageous repenting her initial review, and believes the show's biggest legacy is the confidence it brought to the New Zealand television industry. 'There's self awareness in the writing, which means they get away with a lot – and it was just really funny,' Wichtel says. 'When you have that confidence and a sense of where the drama is coming from, where the characters are coming from, it really works.'
It might have been the sex and swearing that made the nation sit up and take notice every Tuesday night, but at its leather-and-lace-covered heart, Outrageous was a story about New Zealand values like family, loyalty and ingenuity. Its broad appeal meant it spoke to middle New Zealand; you didn't have to be a bogan from West Auckland to relate to Cheryl's quest to save her children from a life of crime. 'I don't know what parent on Earth has not thought, 'all right, this week I'm going to fix this family',' says Vanessa Alexander, who directed episodes one and two. 'That is what you watch Cheryl do, over and over.'
'All right, this week I'm going to fix this family.'
Between Outrageous and Westside (the award-winning prequel that screened between 2015 and 2020), New Zealanders invited the Wests into their homes for over 15 years. Barnett calls them our most famous family. 'There wouldn't be anybody in New Zealand who hasn't seen Outrageous Fortune or Westside, or who doesn't know what the Wests mean,' he says. 'It leaves behind such a great legacy and such a good feeling.'
And it all comes back to Lang, listening to the news in the shower on that fateful day back in 2003. 'The heart of Rachel Lang was in that show from beginning to end, and it was such a true, passionate love letter to working class Kiwis,' Malcolm says. The popularity of Outrageous proves we're all a bit rough around the edges, she believes, no matter how much money we've got in the bank. 'Scratch the surface of any New Zealander and you'll find a Cheryl, or a Van, or a Jethro. That's what Rachel and James tapped into.'
On that cold winter's night in July 2005, Outrageous Fortune made New Zealanders fall in love with themselves. It was a groundbreaking, entertaining television series filled with our voices, our humour and our people, no matter how flawed and foul-mouthed. It may be 20 years since Cheryl West decided to fuck it and play it straight, but the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune still hit deep.
Click here to read the rest of our Outrageous Week coverage as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the series. Watch Outrageous Fortune here on TVNZ+ or on the Outrageous Fortune YouTube channel.