This Is Not My Life

This show is brilliant! It's 3 plus movies all mixed into one brilliant TV series. It's The Trueman Show, Total Recall & The Matrix all mixed into one! Plus a bit of the movie Memento perhaps. Each episode gets better and better and you you learn more and more about where the heck they are. It's not annoying like Lost was eg 3 steps forward and 2 steps back! Truly brilliantly written show with surprisingly great actors! New Zealand has come a long way. I really hope this show has a season 2 and more story line permitting! Can't wait to find out who is good and who is bad Wont say any more as I don't want to spoil it. Watch this show it is brilliant! P.S. Writing 10 lines is kinda hard when all you want to write is one word. BRILLIANT!

I only discovered this show thanks to a mention in a review of Humans. To that reviewer - thank you so much!

The concept reminded me very much of "The Prisoner" (original series) - there's an overly happy village where everyone spouts platitudes but with an underbelly of mind control and serious menace; a central hero; lots of uncertainty about what's going on; and it's impossible to escape (or is it?).

The casting, acting, scripts and whole feel of the production were spot- on. I watched the whole show in the course of a couple of days.

Very surprised that it is not well known - I would have expected it to have a cult following. Tried hard to buy DVDs (including looking at online Kiwi shops), but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere. The good news is that the whole series is on Youtube.

Very highly recommended.

i've read reviews of this show by NZ viewers, and they seem surprised that such a show is produced in NZ. i hope that is because they are glad to see such good entertainment, and not because most of the NZ programming is rubbish.

now, this is a well written show, well thought out and well acted. as said before, it proves that good programming is not dependent on cash, but on good writing, good actors dedicated to the project, and a good production team which is dedicated to the quality and authenticity of the series.

it makes no matter where a series is made, if there is intelligent use of existing locations, then with a small budget one can create an alternate reality, especially if it is not too far removed from the present.

but the most important factor--just ask any competent actor--is the writing. in television, more so than film, the writing must be tight. a two-hour film allows for more fat in the dialog than a one hour show, but that being said, a TV series allows for more character development, but also invites--if poorly made--more filler without advancing the narrative and plot-line.

this show is a tight project. i recommend it to anyone of above average IQ, and those who are burned out on the recycled plot-lines most producers fob onto their mass audience.

most TV runs on the premise that cash is king, but not this one. somebody cared about this series, and thank goodness.

New Zealand has an astounding amount of TV and Film talent for such a small population and This is Not My Life is a well acted and beautifully produced piece of TV. I think that the care that went into this goes beyond scriptwriting and acting (both of which are top notch).The sets and setting are detailed and consistent down to the graphical user interfaces on PDAs and office computers - an alternative but very plausible view of where 2010 technology is heading. The look and feel of the world we are being invited into here has details that describe a dystopian New Zealand down to the overly plastic 'Kia Ora' greeting. Although this is a very Kiwi futuristic drama I hope that this TVNZ production gets taken up by the international networks, it deserves as wide a showing as possible.

The plot owes something to the 1960s series 'The Prisoner' and also to 'Lost' given that the early episodes resolve nothing about how Waimoana came to exist. More than that there is a Kubrick feel to this production based on a tenacious attention to detail by the whole team.

Another excellent Show sacrificed on the altar of quick buck is this one from New Zealand. While the core premise - one person finds himself in a surreal situation and uncovers the machinations behind it - is not new and was quite well presented in a couple older shows like the prisoner or nowhere man,this shows approach and storyline is as well thought out and written as the show invasion which tackled the stone old sf-theme of an attempted "alien" takeover. Which means the story is densely written,with interesting and believable characters and a down to earth sf-technology-approach that paints a very convincing picture of the near future. Like in invasion the writers avoid pointing fingers at an evil power behind the curtain that pulls all the strings. In fact it seems that individual ambitions in the management are tainting the middle class eden project here. Sadly we are literally left in the middle of nowhere with this show because it was not renewed for the second season and sold out to ABC - which is a known HQ-SF-Show killer btw.. "This is not my life" is easily the best SF that came out of New Zealand in decades. Kudos to all who were involved in making this show and shame on all who killed it.