Under the Vines is a postcard from New Zealand that Australia co-signed

There is a genre of television that I think of as “landscape with characters.” The scenery arrives first. It fills the frame, it sets the mood, it does about sixty per cent of the emotional work. Then the characters show up, and they are fine, and they have problems, and you watch them sort through those problems while a mountain range or a coastline or a vineyard does something extraordinary in the background. Under the Vines is this kind of show. It knows it, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The series premiered on Acorn TV and Stan in 2022, produced by South Pacific Pictures in New Zealand with Australian co-production involvement. Rebecca Gibney plays Daisy Munroe, a recently divorced Sydney socialite who discovers she has co-inherited a vineyard in Central Otago from a distant relative. Charles Edwards plays Louis Oakley, a disgraced English wine merchant who has inherited the other half. Neither of them knows anything about making wine. The vineyard is falling apart. Central Otago is beautiful and uninterested in their problems.

The comfort formula

I want to be honest about what Under the Vines is, because being honest about it is not the same as dismissing it. This is comfort television. The plot beats are predictable. The character arcs follow established trajectories. The two leads who cannot stand each other will, by the end of the season, have developed a grudging respect that the audience has seen coming since the opening credits. The local community will be eccentric in precisely calibrated ways. There will be a dog.

The question with comfort TV is never whether it surprises you. It is whether it executes the familiar well enough that the familiarity becomes the point. Under the Vines does this more often than it does not, and the primary reason is the landscape. Central Otago is one of those places that makes cinematography look easy. The light in the Gibbston Valley does things that a colourist would be afraid to attempt digitally, and the show’s director of photography (Matt Henley) has the good sense to let the camera sit with it. There are shots in Under the Vines that belong in a tourism campaign, and I mean that as both a compliment and a diagnosis.

Gibney carries it

Rebecca Gibney has been a fixture of Australian television for so long that it is easy to take her for granted. This would be a mistake. Her performance in Under the Vines is doing something quietly clever: she is playing a character who is performing confidence, and Gibney lets you see the performance without ever breaking it. Daisy is a woman who has spent her adult life in a world of money and surfaces, and the vineyard forces her into contact with a reality that does not respond to charm or social positioning. Gibney plays the adjustment with a lightness that keeps the show from tipping into melodrama, and when the script gives her a moment of genuine vulnerability, she earns it because she has been holding the character together so tightly up to that point.

Edwards is a good foil. His Louis is fussy and precise in a way that plays well against Gibney’s performance of breezy confidence, and the two actors have a chemistry that is more interesting than the scripts always deserve. The show is at its best in the small moments between them: a shared look over a glass of terrible wine they have made themselves, a conversation on the veranda that reveals more than either character intended. These moments feel improvised even when they are not, which is a credit to both performers.

The co-production question

Under the Vines raises a question that comes up regularly with trans-Tasman productions: whose show is it? The vineyard is in New Zealand. The production company is in Auckland. The landscape is unmistakably Kiwi. But the lead actress is Australian, the show aired on Stan to an Australian audience, and Australian money helped pay for it. The show exists in a space that is neither fully one country nor the other, and whether that is a strength or a weakness depends on what you think television is supposed to do.

The optimistic reading is that the co-production model allows shows to exist that neither market could support alone. New Zealand’s domestic audience is small. Australia’s appetite for light comedy-drama is large but not infinite. By combining the two, a show like Under the Vines gets made, and audiences in both countries get something they would not otherwise have. The pessimistic reading is that the co-production model produces shows that belong to no one, that are set in beautiful places without being about those places, that use landscape as a selling point rather than a subject.

Under the Vines falls somewhere between these two readings, and the balance shifts episode by episode. When the show is interested in Central Otago as a place with its own history and its own community, it works. When it uses Central Otago as a scenic backdrop for plot mechanics that could happen anywhere, it is pleasant but weightless.

The comparison problem

You could compare Under the Vines to any number of fish-out-of-water shows, but the most instructive comparison might be to 500 Words, the 2021 trans-Tasman show about a struggling writer. Both are co-productions. Both use New Zealand locations. Both feature Australian performers negotiating unfamiliar territory. The difference is tonal: 500 Words was trying to be something more pointed, and Under the Vines is content to be warm. Neither approach is inherently better. But warmth is easier to sustain across a season, and Under the Vines benefits from its own modesty.

A second season was produced and aired in 2023, which suggests the comfort formula worked well enough for the platforms involved. The numbers were never publicly reported in detail, which is standard for streaming, but the renewal itself is a data point. Someone watched it. Someone watched it while the landscape of Central Otago filled their living room, and the plot hummed along predictably, and the wine got slightly better each episode, and the dog did something endearing.

There are worse things a show can be. Under the Vines is a postcard, and postcards have their uses. You send them to say: I was somewhere beautiful, and I thought of you, and here is a picture that does not quite capture it but gives you the idea. The show does not quite capture Central Otago either. But it gives you the idea, and for comfort television, that is enough.