My Very Own ZONE of Interest
How I went from reviewing my favourite shows in my spare time for Stuff to running an entire television channel for Sky TV ... then not.
The year 2014 is the most tumultuous year I’ve ever experienced: it started with my wife in the third trimester of her first pregnancy, and the year involved a child birth, a city move, a new job, and a television channel launch.
Phew.
The television channel was New Zealand’s first - and, to date, only - science fiction/fantasy channel THE ZONE and today, November 3rd, is the tenth anniversary of its launch as part of the Sky TV platform. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that science fiction and fantasy is my favourite genre of television, film, book, video game, everything. It was a dream job.
I had thought to do a kind of oral history with people involved and explore what led to its launch and why it panned out the way that it did - but as I’m still working in the industry, albeit not at Sky TV, it seems inappropriate to get into the weeds behind the scenes of the what made THE ZONE tick.
But I did want to mark the anniversary. So here is a much more personal story of how I ended up working on a channel that could’ve been made just for me.
One note: with one relevant exception, I’ve decided to leave out names of those involved as I did not seek their permission before writing this.
PROLOGUE: THE REVIEWER
Okay, so real quick:
Back in 2003, I taught myself HTML coding and started to write my own blog named The Flea Market, focusing on pop culture, movie and music reviews, and eventually television reviews - initially focused on the TV series Lost, to which I committed 5000+ words per week.
From there, I became the inaugural (maybe only ever) music reviewer for a conservative Christian monthly magazine named Investigate, and writing features for a local free community mag called Scene.
In mid-2010, I read a really badly written review of the Lost series finale on Stuff, and took it upon myself to email the entertainment editor and suggest they let me write about TV for the site. That editor? Boiler Room’s Chris Schulz, who forwarded my email on to the blogs section editor.
By this point, I had started to think about becoming a writer as a potential career move, but knew it wasn’t likely to be a full time gig.
So, inspired by writers like Alan Sepinwall, James Poniewozik and Emily Nussbaum, I pitched the blogs editor on the idea of a TV blog that posted several times a week and discussed various shows, believing I could write this in my spare time, similar to several other blogs running on Stuff at the time. After a bit of back and forth, we launched my blog On The Box in August 2010. It was super fun.
This period was documented by Schulz at The Spinoff in mid-2022.
By late 2013, my wife1 and I were married and pregnant with our first child, my gran had passed away, I had launched a website named TeeV in an effort to expand my empire, and I had moved from Stuff to the NZ Herald.
My first piece of writing was a review of the 2013 finale of Shortland Street. I watched the episode then wrote the review on my phone and sent it through by email from outside my oldest daughters’ intermediate school prize-giving.
PART 1: THE MOVE
Around the same time that I was working a full time job PLUS writing reviews for the NZ Herald online PLUS launching my own website PLUS hosting a podcast for said website, a job listing popped up on my radar.
Sky TV were looking for a channel manager to run SoHo, their premium entertainment channel which launched in October 2011, and was home to the best shows on television - at the time, Game Of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and a ton of library content from HBO (The Wire, The Sopranos, et al). To be honest, I had no idea that ‘channel manager’ was a job, but I didn’t let that stop me from throwing my hat in the ring.
I didn’t get the job.2
However, I was contacted by the entertainment programming management team to say they were pleasantly surprised to find out that I was interested in working within the industry, and to see if I would be interested in discussing another role which was coming up the following year and was better suited to my knowledge base.
The role was as a consultant for a new science fiction channel that had recently been given the go ahead. I told them I was interested. A slow process of recruitment followed - I visited Auckland several times, including a lunch with the head of entertainment, and was offered a role on the team.
By the time the contract made its way to me, my wife had given birth to our first daughter, and I signed on the day after she was born, perusing the contract and putting pen to paper in the maternity ward at Whangarei Hospital.
The job came with a start date of April 1, meaning a) it was potentially the most devastating April Fools prank ever; and b) we had less than a month to wrap up my current job3, and do all the preparations needed to move to a new city.
It’s times like this that your village tends to step up: my wife got used to being a new Mum while I visited Auckland to try and lock in somewhere to stay, and my mother-in-law was invaluable, helping us pack and prepare, and even staying in our rental in Whangarei after we moved to clean it up and finish packing.
After a quick trip to deliver some basic necessities - a bed, a couch, a fridge - my wife and I drove from Whangarei to Auckland on March 31 with a car full of our belongings, our four-week old daughter in the back seat, and our sedated cat in a cage between my wife’s legs in the front seat.
We moved the rest of our stuff a week later.
PART 2: THE BUILD-UP
Fortunately, it turned out that it wasn’t the most devastating April Fools prank ever conceived - my first day, I was introduced to the person I would work most closely with and learn most everything from4, had my photo taken for my security tag (the same photo was used for my entire nine year stay), and spent most of the afternoon watching the Scandi-scifi Real Humans.
Launching a television channel is essentially done in three phases:
1. Programming
The main function of my role at the beginning was to become a content maven: research content that was available and could play on the channel; advise on content licencing (including older content that would play off peak); and start gaming out what the schedule could look like based on what shows we had available and what needs and slots we had remaining.
We quickly identified that the SyFy channel was an obvious source of content, and went about licencing their biggest show at the time: Defiance, a space opera that starred Kiwi actor Grant Bowler and became our Monday 8.30pm staple, which we followed up with Helix, a techno-horror that starred Shōgun’s Hiroyuki Sanada. We also picked up a handful of SyFy titles that had never aired in NZ before: Eureka, Warehouse 13 and Haven being the best.
Tuesday nights were bolstered by From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, a remake of the Robert Rodriguez series that starred Eiza Gonzalez (Baby Driver, 3 Body Problem) before she was a huge star. Thursday nights boasted the vampire series The Strain, created by Guillermo del Toro and based on his book, and starring Corey Stoll. Friday nights were held down by the MTV series Teen Wolf, starring Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner).
Friday’s also boasted my favourite innovation: Cinema Z, a weekly F-grade horror/action/sci-fi movie slot - movies (mostly made by Asylum Films) like Sharknado, Airplane vs Volcano and Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. We hired a pair of media-savvy guys to introduce the film in a silly studio-filmed sequence that played before the film started, as well as a quick tag at the end. Viewers tweeted along at home with the hashtag #CinemaZ and were occasionally joined by the bemused cast and crew.5
2. Marketing
This phase starts alongside programming, as it involves the look and feel of the channel - what the ad breaks look like, what the voice-over sounds like, all that sort of thing. Then, later, it moves into promoting the channel.
We were blessed by one of the best in the business, a publicist who was unafraid of taking risks and doing things differently, which was very much in the spirit of the channel. We constructed a channel themed board game. We ended up sponsoring Armageddon Expo for a couple of years. It was a super fun time.
3. Scheduling
This is the business end of the channel programming: actually putting the shows into the transmission software, then handing it on to two others: one who inserted all the bits that make it look like the channel, and another who placed all the commercials and promos. This part is a grind, and it loops every single month for the programming team, and every day for those other two.
PART 3: THE LAUNCH
We launched THE ZONE - we insisted on the capitalisation - on November 3, 2014, a week after the conclusion of Armageddon Expo in Auckland.
This period is a bit of a blur now. I know there was a cake with black fondant and a ZONE logo on it. There was a photo booth in the office, and a makeup artist turning people into zombies. We managed to find some inflatable tentacles and had them waving around out the windows of a bar in Ponsonby.
A sizzle reel played for days before we went live on air, then we launched at 4pm with the Cinema Z hosts doing an interview with me about the new channel before we tossed to Sharknado, followed by Stargate SG-1. My main memory of appearing on the channel at that time was that one of the first tweets about THE ZONE was a person asking why I was mansplaining television.6
The first week went really well. Everything ran to schedule, the ratings seemed to be in a good place, feedback was overwhelmingly good, and positivity about the channel’s proposition was at (what turned out to be) an all time high. We had somehow launched a specialist channel and everyone loved it.
And then I just settled into the routine of running a channel: putting together the schedule, inserting it into the transmission software, liaising with teams around Sky TV to make sure everything looked good, rinse, repeat, month in, month out.
PART 4: THE END
In hindsight, I should have seen the writing on the wall: ratings dropped while costs went up due to a number of factors, some of which were outside my control entirely. The wins were few and far between: a series based on The Shannara Chronicles (starring a pre-fame Austin Butler) showed promise in early 2016, and a series based on James Patterson’s Zoo (starring James Wolk) did well in 2015, but they were positive notes among a lot of disappointment.
Defiance didn’t perform well long term. The Strain turned out not to be a premium title like we had hoped. New titles - Ash vs Evil Dead, Dominion, Continuum, 12 Monkeys, The Expanse - came and barely made a dent. Older content arrived in the schedule - The X Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Stargate Atlantis, Fringe - and didn’t move the needle.
By the tail end of 2016, unbeknownst to me at the time, discussions were starting to happen about the future of the channel - or lack thereof - based on a measure that quantified a channel’s value to the Sky TV platform as a whole. As it turned out, according to the data, THE ZONE was objectively performing badly.
In February 2017, I was informed that the channel would be taken off air at the end of June; I asked if there was anything I could do to help save the channel, but was reliably informed it was a done deal. From that point on, the job was to use up as much of our remaining content as possible without blowing the budget any further; when we closed, remaining content was sent to other channels.
THE ZONE ceased broadcast just after midnight on the night of June 30th, 2017. I stayed up and watched the final few minutes of programming, then saw it switch to a ‘thanks for watching’ message. THE ZONE, which had been the source of so much tumult in the lives of me and my family, was gone. I wept.
Then I got back to work. I was moved over to run the classics channel JONES! and help launch a spin-off, playfully titled JONES! too. In late 2019, our department was restructured and I moved across to managing the team working on Sky TV’s suite of factual and reality channels. In early 2023, our team was restructured again, and this time I departed Sky TV entirely.
EPILOGUE
The cancellation of THE ZONE preceded a mental breakdown of sorts. My wife and I had our second child in March 2016; the year following was taxing for her (to put it mildly) and hard work for all of us. We made it through that year, and then my reason for even being in this city was suddenly gone. It broke me.
In the two years that followed the news that THE ZONE was closing, I was diagnosed with depression and put on a daily anti-depressant which I take to this day. While my depression diagnosis wasn’t entirely caused by the closure of the channel, its hard not to think of it as the metaphorical straw.
Hell, my wife and I separated back in May, and I have to imagine my mental health - combined with a global pandemic - were a factor.
I don’t know if I’ve ever told anyone I worked with this, but I wouldn’t have taken a job at Sky TV if it wasn’t on that sci-fi channel. Or SoHo. If they had asked me to join them and run the classics channel at the beginning, it would have been a hard pass. I liked my job at the time. I was enjoying writing.
In fact, something I’ve wrestled with over the years, is whether I would have even taken the job in 2014 had I known the channel wouldn’t make it to its third birthday. Obviously there is no way we could have known that when we made the decision to uproot our family and move to Auckland for - what felt like at the time - a kind of dream job. Hindsight is a helluva thing.
Look, I really enjoy the job I have now; I’m doing interesting and challenging work. My closest colleagues are a wonderful group of people. I made some brilliant friends during my time at Sky TV. I’m not upset with where I’ve ended up, and through therapy I’ve made peace with everything that has happened.
Still. I think I would’ve said no.
And so, in that regard, taking a job at Sky TV to run THE ZONE might just be the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.
A long one today but I felt like I wanted to tell it.
If you made it all the way to the bottom, thank you, thank you, thank you.
See you later in the week, whanau.
Chris xo
Now my ex-wife. She’s cool though.
Fun fact: I applied for and was turned down for this role twice more before I finished my time at Sky TV. It opened up a fourth time when I was there, but I stayed away.
My job at the time was so good, and the people I worked for so wonderful, that I cried my eyes out when I handed in my resignation.
This person loves to tell how I would ask about things relating to my employment, only to find out that I mistakenly believed she was my boss. I referred to her as Faux-boss for years - until 2019 when she became my actual boss.
The regular tweeters continued watching terrible movies together and hanging out on Twitter long after the channel itself was done. I’m overly proud of this.
We somehow managed to swing it so that me and the Cinema Z hosts were the last thing people saw on the channel as well. Just before the channel went off air, a short clip of me sweeping the Cinema Z set then switching off the lights played.
This was a great read Chris, and thanks for the honesty as well. I watched a bit of THE ZONE back in the day and was sad to see it go.