Pockets full of fun with Dennis The Menace

Once upon a time in small-town California, the old Shop N Save down the street from my parents’ house carried comic book digests, tucked in a corner of the magazine rack. Those cozy little 14 cm × 21 cm books full of reprints were quite in vogue in the early 1980s, and packed 100 pages or so of vintage reading for typically less than a buck. 

You’d see superhero reprints from DC and Archie stories, but the best of these digests, for me, were Dennis The Menace Pocket Full of Fun books, gathering up classic comics featuring the adventures of Hank Ketcham’s good-hearted but hyperactive perpetually 5-year-old kid hero Dennis the Menace (no, not that Dennis).

Dennis debuted in comic strips, but soon moved on to his own comic book adventures, overseen by Ketcham but usually drawn by others.

As a budding comics geek, I loved the digest format, although my increasingly aged eyes have found the poorly-printed DC Digests are now almost illegible without heavy magnification – those superhero comics weren’t meant to be shrunk down to pocket size, really. But Dennis, well, his pockets full of fun still hold up pretty well with the less cluttered, more open artwork and lettering, and are still easy to read. 

The funny thing is, I never really was a huge fan of the Dennis The Menace comic strip, or Hank Ketchum’s rather too loose and scratchy art. In my humble opinion, a single panel isn’t really the best comics format unless you’re The Far Side or something. The longer Dennis comics stories worked a lot better for me, letting the pint-size characters have actual adventures and giving Dennis a chance to bounce off his uptight parents in funnier settings.

When I read those Dennis Digests, I quickly figured out there was a “good Dennis” artist tucked in amongst the diligent anonymous imitators of that Ketcham style. There was one particular artist whose stories were packed with crisp, detailed artwork, hilarious slapstick and cartooning and a dynamic wit and energy that many of the other Dennis stories lacked. 

It took me years to figure out who that “good Dennis” artist was. Al Wiseman (1919-1988) was the Dennis “ghost” artist for many years. Working with writer Fred Toole he cracked out dozens of great Dennis comics stories in the ‘50s and ‘60s I discovered reprinted in those Pocket Full of Fun digests. 

There’s something about Wiseman’s style I loved and still love. His cartoony characters are drawn slicker, with more style, his artwork lusher and more detailed – dig those fine ’50s style architectural backgrounds! And the lettering in Wiseman comics sparkles with personality, from the mellow “typewriter” conversational wording to the sharp, angular “shock” script he uses for yelling and screaming (and there’s always a lot of those in Dennis the Menace comics). 

These comic adventures were based in realism – Dennis a precocious but recognisable kid, his parents frazzled Henry and soothing Alice, his gang of neighbourhood friends. The grounded adventures tended to revolve around things like Christmas, family vacations, playing with your best pals – and as chaotic as they got, rarely moved into total fantasy, suiting Wiseman’s exquisitely researched art well. 

The stories became tailored to Wiseman’s strengths and particularly in a series of dazzling “holiday” specials – Dennis The Menace Goes To Hawaii, Washington DC, Mexico, Hollywood, etc – where all his skill at detailed renderings really came together. Goes To Hawaii is reportedly one of the best-selling comics of ALL TIME, with 4.5 million copies sold over several printings.

Ketcham continued drawing the daily Dennis strip till his death but somehow Wiseman and Toole’s work never quite got the appreciation or credit it deserved. Some of their work (along with the also very good Owen Fitzgerald, who had a looser style) was reprinted in some fine hardcover books a few years back, a series which sadly only ended up three volumes long.

At their best those Dennis digests packed with Wiseman goodness hit that “comics for kids and adults” sweet spot that geniuses like Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and John Stanley’s Little Lulu did. 

I long ago lost my childhood Dennis digests but have slowly rebuilt the collection over the years. Any time I see those Dennis digests pop up these days on the open market, I grab them, and any other vintage Dennis comics collecting that sweet Wiseman art.  

‘Still, I have the warmth of the sun’ – RIP to Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson’s music felt like the sound of America – beautiful, optimistic, full of big dreams and more than a little sad sometimes.

Beach Boys founder and principal songwriter Wilson died today at 82, after a career that changed American pop music and the world. 

I was very glad to see Brian Wilson perform his classic album Pet Sounds in Auckland at the Civic in 2016 in what turned out to be his final show in Aotearoa. Then in his early 70s, he was fragile and seemed a bit off in his own reality, but he played those songs and gamely sang along the best he could (of course, the younger band members took those high falsetto notes). 

We loved Brian, that night, simply for showing up and for all that his music represents. Backed by a crack band, he sat at the piano for most of the show and the audience banter was mostly left to fellow ex-Beach Boy Al Jardine. But for anyone who made it there that night, it was a rare glimpse at genius. A nod and a smile from Brian Wilson felt like the sun breaking through clouds. 

I admit, I took a while to warm up to the Beach Boys, who seemed inescapably cheesy when I was growing up in the 1980s, when their only songs you heard were the incredibly catchy and annoying ‘Kokomo’ from Tom Cruise’s movie Cocktail and a painful duet of ‘Wipe Out’ with novelty rap trio The Fat Boys. 

But then, something clicked after I listened to The Beach Boys’ landmark 1966 album Pet Sounds several times. Brian Wilson led the group’s transformation from singing about sand, girls and cars to the existential yearning of ‘God Only Knows.’ 

The charming harmonies of their earlier frothier work were still there, but instead of surfin’ and chicks, Wilson’s gorgeous tunes like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ ‘Caroline, No’ and ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ tapped into some more elemental form of longing. The glossy surface of the best Beach Boys songs hid a world of emotion beneath. Why isn’t life as perfect as we dream it should be, and how do we survive it all? 

After Pet Sounds, Wilson became lost in a fog of drug use, collapsing mental health and creative frustration. The Beach Boys long-delayed album Smile became his waterloo, “lost” and never officially released until it finally came out in several versions years later. 

Wilson battled mental health problems and the trauma from an abusive childhood in an era where help wasn’t easy to get, where you were just told to toughen up and stop your moaning.

Still, Wilson came back from some incredible lows to perform and write again. He got back up, made it here to Auckland in his 70s and still was able to sing those songs about surf, girls and the inner workings of the heart. 

The early Beach Boys song ‘In My Room’ is a gorgeous melody, but in those lyrics – “In this world I lock out / All my worries and my fears / In my room” – they summed up how all of us feel on our bad days, and our hopes for a better tomorrow. 

The Beach Boys weren’t quite as godlike as the Beatles, as dangerous as the Rolling Stones or as groovy as Sly and the Family Stone. Yet their music changed the world by selling that quintessential California optimism worldwide – surf culture everywhere, including New Zealand, would never quite be the same. But it was also selling Wilson’s more subtle messages, of working with your mental health and of finding peace in a complicated life. 

The 1960s saw American optimism start to crack for the first time, in ways we’re still seeing echoes of today. The Beach Boys were never revolutionary, but the best of their songs told us it was OK to sing about your feelings, to admit you were scared and to look for the beauty where you could find it. “Still, I have the warmth of the sun,” Wilson sang in another one of those songs about a girl who left him. There’s always sunshine somewhere. 

It’s been a bad week for music, with the death of Wilson and Sly Stone, two troubled twin dreamers who spun timeless songs out of the chaotic 1960s. Both men dazzled with their talent but spent years isolated and dealing with their own demons. 

I’m an agnostic, but I still like to think that somewhere out there in the cosmos right now Brian Wilson and Sly Stone are sitting there hanging out together writing the best song of all time, and maybe, just maybe, it’s the one we’ll all get to hear one day at the moment our own time comes.

Wouldn’t it be nice? 

Neal Adams just couldn’t help himself

First, a disclaimer: Neal Adams is one of the all-time great comic book artists, and a favourite of mine ever since I picked up some tattered ‘70s Batman reprints and discovered that dynamic, bold style that truly changed comic art.

Adams exploded on the scene with his Batman and other work in the late ‘60s and was a loud revolutionary – he broke comics out of their staid grids and made the comics camera move, and gave Batman, Deadman, Green Arrow, Superman and many more a radically realistic upgrade. His characters heaved with emotion and muscle. Adams, who died in 2022, was truly a trailblazer for comics.

But man, I wish he could have stopped tinkering with his comics. 

Adams was notorious for recolouring, relettering and even redrawing entirely his vintage ’60s and ’70s work when it was reprinted in fancy collections in later years. It almost never improved the art. It often made it a lot worse. 

It was highly noticeable in a Deadman collection I was just re-reading, where Adams’ art is tarted up in garish colours that instantly look dated, re-lettered with bland computer lettering and woozy airbrushed looking highlights and backgrounds. The one on the left is the original. The one on the right in Deadman Book One is almost an entirely redrawn and reworked page.

A few pages later in this same collection, other Adams stories of the era are reprinted as they were – the same dynamic art is given a calmer, more fitting look with the original colours. The styles – old-school Adams and tinkering Adams – clash mercilessly when jammed together into one book. 

Even worse, in collections of his utterly iconic Batman comics of the era, too often they’re served up with gaudy new colors, hideous gradient backgrounds and art tweaking. Give me yellowing newsprint and the work that came from the pen at the time any day. 

Does it look more “modern” when Adams reworked colours and art? Sure, I suppose. But the point of old things is that they are old, and not intrinsically worse because of how they were done at the time.

I’m a developing cranky curmudgeon, I know, but the flatter colouring of vintage comics was just right for the time, and recolouring old comics in modern styles feels to me just as much of a creative violation as colorising old black and white movies is. 

This has all been quietly infuriating Adams fans for years, and it raises lots of hard to answer questions about fans, creators, and who has the agency. 

Like Adams, I believe in creators’ rights, and it’s a knotty question that if Adams wanted to “update” his work like George Lucas has bowlderised the 1977 Star Wars, isn’t that his right? I’m still working that one out. But I believe the work should be reprinted faithfully to how it was first produced. If you want to make a new “updated” version, too, knock yourself out, but don’t suppress the original.

Adams kept working all the way up to his death at age 80, although few fans would say later work like Batman: Odyssey and Fantastic Four: Antithesis lived up to the classics. Adams’ art also took a turn for the grotesque in his final years – all the dynamicism of his early work ‘roided up somehow to look more than a little weird. And let’s not talk about his writing, which was never his strong point:

All artists change their style as they go and so hey, Adams changed, that’s cool. But going back and reworking the work that put him on the map and making it difficult to even find the originally coloured and drawn versions in modern reprintings — well, I love Neal Adams, but I do wish sometimes he would have stopped tinkering and just appreciate his accomplishments as they stood.

He truly was one of the greats – and he was from the moment he first exploded onto the comics scene more than half a century ago. 

Pee-Wee As Himself: I know you are, but what am I? 

Pee-wee Herman was so uncool that he became cool.

Watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, it felt like nothing I’d quite seen before – a colourful, free-spirited adventure of a peculiar man-boy who was searching for his lost bicycle. It kicked off Tim Burton’s career, and for a while, it and his popular children’s TV show made Pee-wee a superstar. Of course, it all fell apart a bit in the end. 

Up until his sudden death from cancer in 2023, Reubens wrestled with Pee-wee’s legacy – was the character eating him alive? It surely felt so at times. 

The fascinating new 3 1/2 hour documentary Pee-wee As Himself reveals Reubens as never before, in a posthumous tribute and confession from this remarkable, furiously independent man. 

I was one of the weirdos at age 13 when Pee-wee hit the big screen. Gawky, shrimpy and obsessed with comic books and action figures and all that jazz, I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. Was I the good church-going Presbyterian my folks raised me as, or was I an artsy innovator – or was I both? I got picked on and called “strange” a lot in adolescence and to me, Pee-wee Herman was a revelation. He showed you didn’t have to fit in some “cool” box. Some found him annoying. I found him liberating. 

Even in the ‘80s, a decade filled with eccentric superstars from Mr T to Boy George to Michael Jackson, Pee-wee stood out. Almost never breaking character, Reubens created a kind of Peter Pan for the MTV generation. Pee-wee would never grow up (in his final appearance in the genial 2016 film Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, Reubens was 64 years old, but you’d barely know it). 

Pee-wee, freaky as he was, was a signal for many of us misfits and those struggling with their identity that it was cool to be just who you are. Both in his movies and the kid-friendly Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the ultimate message was acceptance – a vibe which feels more precious and precarious than ever here in 2025. 

What elevates this lengthy documentary is Reubens’ very vocal, opinionated participation, in 40 hours of interviews done shortly before his death. He spars with the director several times over whether he should be taking part at all, whether the documentary would be better if he directed it, and over just how much he wants to reveal. Reubens’ endearingly cranky debating feels like a discussion on the merits and failings of celebrity documentary as a whole, and somehow his tense reluctance makes Pee-wee As Himself feel richer and more multi-dimensional. 

Reubens hid his homosexuality for much of his career and a particularly heartbreaking revelation in the documentary is what that cost him. He abandoned one long-term relationship as a young man for his career, he bluntly admits, and he knew that in 1980s America he could never come out of that closet.

Of course, Pee-wee As Himself hits on the scandals – his 1992 arrest at an adult cinema, the very dodgy attempt to drag him over his collection of erotica in the early 2000s. Seen today when corruption and malice are everywhere, those so-called “scandals” seem pettier than ever and carry a large whiff of homophobia. 

It’s hard to fathom now just how omnipresent Pee Wee was in US culture after Pee-wee’s Big Adventure came out. He’d appear in rock videos and magazine covers and had toy dolls made of him, but he was always slightly, cheekily subversive. (Rewatching Pee-wee’s Playhouse episodes today as a creaky adult, you realise how much he played with the very idea of a kids’ show, and never, ever gave up on pushing those envelopes.) 

Pee-wee As Himself spends a lot of time exploring how Reubens came to create the character, and how the freeform experimentation of art school, performance art and the Groundlings improv troupe formed him. Reubens wanted to become a superstar, and embraced Pee-wee, who subsumed all the other character creations Reubens had been playing with and took over. 

Pee-wee went mainstream for a while, but was firmly a creature of the alternative underground tweaked just enough to “pass”. In today’s culture wars-infested world I don’t think Pee-wee Herman would’ve made it past the workshopping stage, although you can see hints of his wonderful surreal imagination in things like Adventure Time. 

I admit to choking up a little hearing what Reubens recorded the day before he died – even the filmmakers didn’t know about his cancer battle – and his last message: “I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love.”

The art of Criterion: Judging a movie by its cover

Because a man has got to have hobbies, one of mine is collecting boutique blu-rays of movies you typically won’t find on the anemic streaming services down here in NZ. And the gold standard of fancy-schmancy blu-rays has always been the Criterion Collection, which has specialised in bringing both iconic classics and obscure discoveries to screens for years now. 

Criterions play to the obsessive fans out there – who doesn’t love a good Criterion Closet video? – and one of their calling cards is the often-dazzling artwork they put on their discs. In an age where physical media seems to be becoming an afterthought for so many people whose eyeballs are glued to their phones 24-7 , Criterions are still cool, darn it. Even Natasha Lyonne thinks so:

Sometimes their disc covers play with recognisable imagery, sometimes they go abstract and arty as heck. On a recent trip to San Francisco, I visited my beloved Amoeba Records, which boasts an entire heaving shelf of used Criterions in their movie room. I dove in to fill in my Criterion Charlie Chaplin collection, rare noirs and more, and a few times, I just picked up a movie because I liked the cover.

You probably shouldn’t judge a movie entirely by its cover – or its poster, for that matter – but sometimes, a single stark image can lure you into discovering something entirely new. Take the gritty delights of Burt Lancaster’s prison breakout movie Brute Force, which drew me in solely based on that amazing artwork. Or the incredibly insane gonzo Japanese horror-comedy, 1977’s House, which sucked me in just with that haunting dog/demon/ghost image on the cover. 

I love the Criterions which don’t just do a variation on the movie poster, but instead pick an image from the movie to capture the vibe wonderfully – Clark Gable’s It Happened One Night, or Billy Wilder’s icy cold noir Double Indemnity. Of course, not every Criterion cover is a winner, but when they hit, they hit. 

I know we’ve got an ocean of “content” to navigate these days, but for me, sometimes the best gamble to take is picking a random Criterion based solely on its art, perhaps a movie I’ve vaguely heard of, perhaps one I’ve never heard of. You never know, you might discover your next favourite thing.

You can’t judge a movie by its cover, but you sure can be seduced by it. 

RIP Peter David, who made being funny look easy

Peter David perhaps wasn’t quite a household name, but any comics fan from the late 1980s onward knew who he was. The acclaimed comics and novel writer died overnight at age 68.

David’s remarkable 12-year-run on the Incredible Hulk changed the character forever from the “Hulk smash” days, while his work on everything from Spectacular Spider-Man to Aquaman to X-Factor to Star Trek was always entertaining, full of humour and sharp dialogue. He wrote many novels and was also an excellent, underrated essayist with his long-running “But I Digress” columns in the late, great Comics Buyers’ Guide. 

Simply put, he was a writer who knew the assignment, and delivered almost every time. 

Unfortunately, his sadly early death wasn’t a shock, as he’d been in terrible health for ages. David suffered a stroke in 2012 and spent most of the last few years in hospital or rehab care due to kidney disease, diabetes, heart attacks and more strokes. As a fan, it was hard to hear news of his slow decline. Remarkably, he kept writing through most of it all. 

Being funny is harder than it looks, but David often made it look easy. His relaxed, friendly style and deft hand with a one-liner stood out from the crowd when he began writing professionally after a long stint in sales for Marvel Comics. 

Reading David’s early Hulk and Spider-Man comics back when I was in high school, his voice was an important influence for me in developing my own goofy comics writing style with Amoeba Adventures. 

I’ve always been drawn to the sour and sweet combination of mixing dramatic moments with silly one-liners and slapstick, and David was a master at that balance. He knew when to go for the gag and to go for the gut. Not every joke landed or has dated well, but there was a lightness of spirit to Peter David’s best work that holds up well. 

He was never an Alan Moore/Grant Morrison type writer who deconstructed the comics medium, but instead a steady journeyman like Kurt Busiek or Roger Stern who could be counted on for providing usually excellent comics soaked in that hilarious wit.

His death may not have been preventable, but the one thing that makes me truly angry today is how Peter David and his family spent so much of the last few years fighting to fund his health care.  It was great to see so much support for crowdfunding his care when the call came – I donated a couple times myself – but with his death today, I wonder why it came down to GoFundMe to support a dying man and his family. 

Disney, DC Comics and Sony made millions and millions from Peter David creations like Spider-Man 2099 in the Spider-Verse movies, the “smart” Professor Hulk as seen by Mark Ruffalo in Avengers: Endgame, the revamp of the dull fishy Aquaman into the sexy long-haired, bearded warrior that Jason Momoa turned into a worldwide movie hit, the Young Justice team of tween sidekick heroes who headlined a hit animated series – just for starters. 

And yet twice, his family had to turn to GoFundMe for help as David’s condition worsened, as Medicaid cut off funding and his widow Kathleen spent an unfathomable amount of time wrestling with the unfair labyrinth of American health “care”. I’m not saying corporations owe it to creators to fund every moment of their lives, but David suffered for a long, long time in hospitals and rehab, and a million dollars jointly donated by Marvel, DC and Sony could have gone a long way and been a drop in the bucket for companies like Disney and Sony that earn billions every year.

Comics will break your heart, the Jack Kirby saying popularised by NZ cartoonist Dylan Horrocks goes, but Peter David’s last years could have been a bit easier with a little bit of corporate kindness. His life’s work amused and entertained millions. It would be nice to think his death might make a difference somehow, too. 

All hail Tom Cruise, the impossible entertainer

Of course, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is ridiculous. It’s preposterous and excessive and just so very, very much – and that’s kind of why I love it and Tom Cruise’s dogged, determined drive to entertain the hell out of us all for nearly 30 years, whether we want it or not.

It’s insane that Cruise has been playing gritty intelligent agent Ethan Hunt for 29 years. As a point of comparison, if Sean Connery had played James Bond as long as Cruise had played Hunt, he would’ve been in Bond movies from 1962 to 1991, well into his bearded balding Hunt for Red October/Untouchables elder statesman era.

The MI movies kicked off with Brian DePalma’s twisty, relatively restrained 1996 original, and derailed a bit with John Woo’s lavishly dated 1999 style overdose in Mission: Impossible 2.

But for me, the series staged a remarkable comeback beginning with 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, with the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sneering villain and Cruise’s Hunt given just a little more of a personality. Simon Pegg’s twitchy Benji and Ving Rhames’ sturdy Luther coalesced into the heart of a solid little team for Ethan, who is, as more than one character has noted, always going rogue or about to go rogue from his vaguely omnipresent Impossible Mission Force.

Cruise and his creative partner for most of the last few movies, director Christopher McQuarrie, settled into a solid routine of dastardly global threats, sneering villains and incredible stunt scenes that the rest of the plot basically is there to support.

The sixth instalment, 2018’s Mission Impossible: Fallout, reached an improbable high point for the series. This, Cruise whispered in audience ears as he bounced off mountain ranges and airplanes and ran, always ran, to the next plot point – this, is an action movie. 

To bring James Bond back again, Cruise quietly surpassed that franchise for reliable action thrills some time ago. While Daniel Craig starred in some of the best Bonds, studio meddling and creative fumbling also stuck him in some of the worst. Cruise and McQuarrie had a clear vision for their series. Even at the series’ nadir – John Woo, hello – a Mission: Impossible movie has never been less than a good time, check your brain at the door.

I like to think of what I call “the piano move” from 2023’s Dead Reckoning as a symbol of the series as a whole and its amiable desire to please. After surviving a pitched knife battle on the roof of a moving train, after that train then crashes off a cliff, after Ethan Hunt and partner clamber dangerously through the train cars before they fall into a canyon, after all that, in the final car, we see a piano, hanging on by a single strap, about to hurtle down through a train car and into Hunt and partner. Will that piano fall? You bet it will. In Ethan Hunt’s world, there’s always another piano about to fall on you. 

The best moments of the MI movies are nothing but piano moves, where Cruise fascinates you with his ingenuity and escape skills. I’d be dead about 5 seconds into trying to have a knife fight with a madman on the top of a moving train, for instance. For Cruise, that’s just a Wednesday. 

Final Reckoning, at nearly three hours, does suffer a bit of end-times fatigue – the two-part story Dead Reckoning and this comprise, about a rogue artificial intelligence, is timely, but it’s all tarted up with an absurd amount of MacGuffins and missions that are, well, impossible. Watching parts 7 and 8 over two nights, as I did, exposes you to nearly six hours of Tom Cruise running like mad – it’s like mainlining energy drinks while eating popcorn. Gradually, Cruise has become a messiah figure in the movies, as the challenges get ever more impossible. 

You’d expect part 8 of a series to run low on steam, and the opening act of Final Reckoning is a little sluggish, but when it gets going – especially with two stunning set-pieces involving a submarine and a biplane – all your doubts fly away, and you find yourself asking, “how is he doing that?” I don’t care that in real life Tom Cruise would’ve died like 50 times over by now. I just go for the ride. 

Yeah, yeah I know, while Cruise does a lot of his own stunts there is a certain amount of movie magic and digitally erased safety gear behind it all, but that doesn’t distract from the tactile reality of seeing a man scale the Burj Khalifa towers as he did in 2011’s Ghost Protocol or clutching feverishly onto a spinning biplane in this romp. He was there and not just in some green screen studio laboratory. And the fact that the man is now 62 is astonishing. 

In his dogged quest to be the impossible entertainer and singlehandedly save us all as The Last Movie Star, Cruise has largely abandoned some of the more interesting acting choices he made before he went all-in on the impossible. His turns in movies like Magnolia, Edge of Tomorrow, Interview With A Vampire and Collateral showed a brooding range. I kind of hope he might take some more chances if this, as it probably should be, is the last impossible mission.

These movies aren’t deep, but they’re fine machines of movie magic – mostly devoid of the CGI-slathered blurs that are starting to make superhero and action movies all feel like the same unreal videogame slurry. Mission: Impossible movies are ridiculous, absurd, over the top. And I reckon that both me and Tom Cruise wouldn’t have it any other way. 

How The Pitt became the best TV I’ve seen so far this year

None of us like to go to the hospital, right? I mean, I spent a few nights in one several years back over some health issues and to be honest, florescent lights and hospital gowns still give me the willies.

So it’s weird, then, that my favourite TV programme of 2025 so far is a white-knuckle ride through 15 hours or so in a heaving hospital emergency room. 

The Pitt caught me off guard, because I’m not really a hospital-TV show guy. Sure, I watched ER a fair bit back in the day, along with everyone else, but gave up somewhere before season 28 or however long it ran. I’ve seen a handful of episodes of House but never watched a single Grey’s Anatomy or Shortland Street or The Good Doctor.

Yet The Pitt is addictive, anchored by a charismatic performance by ER veteran Noah Wyle as a scruffy and exhausted attending physician at a bustling Pittsburgh trauma hospital. 

The central conceit is that The Pitt is set in one incredibly busy day at the hospital, told over a series of episodes set from 7am to 10pm. It instantly gives The Pitt a propulsive energy that means you immediately want to know what’s going to happen next and helps damp down the soap-opera sappiness that muddles many medical shows. Brought to you by many of the people behind 1990s ER, it’s dense with an impressive medical detail that never distracts from the fundamental work – saving lives. 

Hospitals are busy, overworked and understaffed places, in New Zealand and everywhere else, and in a single day The Pitt deals with accidents, traumas, overdoses, pregnancies, shootings and worse. Everyone here is having a bad day, and yet despite how dark it gets The Pitt summons up a lightness of spirit echoed by its workers – the only possible way to get through a day at the hospital. 

The Pitt feels like a microcosm of America in 2025 – broken, hurting, but still hunting for that essential decency despite unfortunate events constantly crashing our way. Without being overly preachy about it, it hits on hot-button issues like abortion, opiate abuse, gun violence, pandemic trauma and anti-vaxxers. 

Wyle, who once upon a time was the fresh-faced newbie in ER, brings years of experience being a ‘pretend doctor’ to his role, and anchors the series with his battered idealism. But there’s a lot of great acting here, including Isa Briones as a cocky intern, Katherine LaNasa as the charge nurse and Fiona Dourif as a harried resident with a troubled past. 

I’m constantly awed by people who give their lives to the medical profession, enduring hard hours and traumatic experiences. By taking a single day and showing how chaotic and important work in the ER is, The Pitt is vastly entertaining and harrowing at the same time. It’s extraordinary. 

How I became a journalist who doesn’t drink coffee

Coffee and journalism generally go together like fish and chips. But somehow, I’m slowly becoming a journalist who doesn’t drink coffee.

Not to get all medical on you, but I’ve had irritating recurring problems with Laryngopharyngeal Reflux or LPR the past year or so, and it’s been increasingly obvious to this middle-aged git that I need to reconsider things I used to eat or drink without even thinking about it. 

Troubling things like raw tomatoes or bacon have slowly slid from my diet, but I was reluctant to give up coffee because it was a habit, and we love our habits. But back in January I made the call to give up coffee and see how I did.

It hasn’t erased the problem, which is irritatingly random at times, but it’s definitely made a little bit of a difference. 

The surprising thing for me is that I haven’t really even missed the actual drink all that much. I had expected coffee having been a regular part of this journo’s diet since about 1990 or so would be like oxygen or sunshine, something I’d wither up and die without. 

But instead, I’ve discovered that I rather enjoy green tea for a caffeine hit, or a can of my once-beloved Pepsi a couple times a week (which also isn’t great for me, admittedly). I have had mornings where the foggy whispering in my brain takes quite a while to recede, but I’ve had other mornings where I felt fairly human from the start. And it’s definitely helped my throat issues.  

I know coffee is a fetish in this problem-plagued world, but the abstinence has made me realise I didn’t really crave the coffee itself. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had more than my share of truly awful coffee – most of the newsrooms in America I worked in over the years specialised in grimy coffee machines exuding a watery brown gruel that probably led to the gradual erosion of my esophagus decades later. Newsrooms, at least in the bad old days, had horrible coffee. Despite that, I used to suck down three, four, five cups a day but for a long time now my max had been two cups, tops.

And of course, if something you’re used to starts to make you feel like garbage, it can take a while to break the habit, but in the end, I didn’t love coffee enough to put up with everything else that came with it for me. 

When I’ve had a truly good coffee, I appreciate the skill that goes into it, but in retrospect, I guess I’ve never really fallen in love with it – more than anything I just liked the caffeine jolt. (I have literally never understood the reason for the existence of decaffeinated coffee. What’s the point?)

I stopped my daily coffee in January and dipped briefly back in a few weeks ago just to see if it really was problematic for me. Both mornings my throat swelled up to the point where I started to wonder if I was actually allergic to the blessed bean now. I don’t think I am, but it was enough to make me think I’d stick to tea, like a good New Zealander, for the duration. 

I can still do journalism without coffee, it turns out – case in point the rather frantic events of Easter Monday when I was running the Radio New Zealand website and about an hour before the scheduled end of my shift, Pope Francis died. Once upon a time I would’ve grabbed a few cups or cracked open some Pepsi to get through it all, but instead I let the adrenaline breaking news buzz – still the best pick-me-up there ever was – carry me through.

We pick up lots of habits in life and then you hit the point where you have to start to give up these habits to ensure an easier go of things. I don’t think I miss my morning cup all that much, but I guess I miss the idea of it. But I’ll get used to it.

Watching Robocop with my Dad

The very first R-rated movie I ever saw in a theatre was Robocop, with my Dad and a buddy. 

It was a pretty full-on choice – Robocop goes hard and never stops, but it’s also one of the most brilliant and satirical action movies of the 1980s. Of course, I didn’t have much cinematic expertise then, at the age of 15 or so. We just saw the poster and TV commercials for this heavy-metal policeman and thought, that looks awesome!

Getting into your first R-rated movie as a teenager was a moment. My pal Nate and I tried, on our own, but were embarrassingly turned down by a snarky cashier only a few years older than us when we tried to see Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America. 

So when it came to Robocop, we somehow talked my Dad into taking us.

Well over 35 years ago now, I can remember cringing a little over the explosion of profanity and violence that pepper Robocop with my Dad sitting next to me. The opening half hour or so, as eager cop Murphy is brutally mown down in torturous detail by cackling psychopaths, is hardcore to watch even today. 

My dad was a good-hearted, church-going and genial guy whose tastes I think ran a little more to Roger Moore James Bond and Tom Clancy books, not splattery sci-fi like Robocop, but he took me anyway. I don’t know quite what he thought as Clarence Boddicker spat invective and people died in inventively bloody ways, but I don’t think he hated it. 

Dad’s been gone nearly a year now, and of course I think about him all the time. 

I re-watched all three Robocop movies recently in a bit of a binge (The very goofy and violent Robocop 2 and the kid-friendly Robocop 3, which I’d actually never even seen, are serious steps down from the flawless polished gleam of the original, of course, but they do have their moments). 

And as memory does, it floats around in your head unasked, and I kept straining to recall that long, long ago afternoon in a movie theatre in ’80s small-town California, watching Robocop with my Dad. It was a very small moment of my time with him over more than 50 years, I know. 

I honestly can’t remember much at all other than how cool Robocop was, but I guess that’s not important. I remember my Dad was there for me, and even if he perhaps quietly thought Robocop was a bit much for his nerdy 15-year-old son, he was pretty cool, too.