Want to see one of the year's best TV shows? Sorry, you can't

By all accounts, ZeroZeroZero is a stunner.

It’s a multi-national cocaine caper involving Mexican cartels, Somalian terrorists, Italian mobsters and New York cocaine barons.

Several of its most memorable and explosive scenes involve a container ship being hijacked by helicopter at sea, a brutal bus execution, a gun battle in a Middle Eastern desert, and a Mafioso boss slitting the throat of a pig, filling up a mug with its blood, then downing it, just to prove a point.

Yes, it sounds grisly and gruesome, and by all accounts, ZeroZeroZero is one of the best TV shows you can see right now.

“It is expertly and beautifully shot, featuring a large ensemble cast of talented actors, and it's unlikely you'll see a more beautiful series of vistas in any other TV show this year,” wrote one critic for Film Inquiry.

“Epic, exciting and exhilarating,” said Film Mafia.

A RogerEbert.com reviewer said the show is “held together by so many great twists that you might find yourself just watching one episode after the next”. 

On The Watch, which remains the most in-depth and decisive podcast for TV fandom around, host Chris Ryan declared the first season finale the single best episode of television he’d seen this year.

Did I mention the show’s eight episode soundtrack is expertly crafted by Mogwai, those Scottish soundscape weirdos who are really quite good at this sort of thing?

Sounds good, right? Sounds like the kind of widescreen international crime caper you’d want to queue up and rip through tonight, yeah?

Doesn’t it sound like the the kind of you’d want to brag about to all your friends the following day?

Sorry, you can’t.

That’s because, right now, no streaming service available legally in New Zealand is hosting ZeroZeroZero, the show adapted from the book of the same name by Roberto Saviano, the writer-in-hiding who’s also responsible for the excellent Gomorrah, another drug book, and Netflix series, based on real life.

Why can’t we watch it? It’s a good question, one I’m still trying to find an answer to.

Overseas, ZeroZeroZero is available through Amazon Prime Video, which remains the most underrated TV streaming service and is full of great shows like Undone, Homecoming and Fleabag. It’s cheap. You should give it a go. We’ve talked about all this before.

I asked a local APV representative why ZeroZeroZero wasn’t available here, and was told it could be a “licensing issue”.

This could be true: multiple studios and several networks were involved in getting this thing to air, and it was shot in five different countries and features several different languages (with subtitles). But I asked around, and it’s also not coming to Sky TV’s Neon platform. It’s not on Apple TV+, or Disney TV+, or TVNZ OnDemand, or ThreeNow, or anywhere else I’ve looked.

So it’s complicated. But we’ve solved issues like this before. Remember when we persuaded Netflix to finally put House of Cards on its New Zealand service?

Here’s the plan: let’s go to the top. If everyone sends Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s ruler-in-chief, an email today, we might be able to make this happen. It’s easy, just copy and paste the message below and send it to jeff@amazon.com. Apparently that really is his email address, and I’m sure he has time to personally respond to each and every one of us.

Jeff! Bruh! How are ya? Still bald? Hey I’m still waiting for my toilet paper that I ordered over lockdown. But that’s not why I’m here. Listen, you probably don’t have time for pleasantries when you’re making $4.4 million an hour and need to count it all, so I’ll cut to the chase: We’re in New Zealand, the place where you’re spending many of your millions to make a Lord of the Rings TV show. It’s great down here: we’ve nearly cleared up Covid-19, our Prime Minister rules, and it hasn’t rained for aaages. You should build a bunker here sometime maybe? Anyway, can you do me a quick favour? Can you flick a switch, pull a few levers, press a button, yell at a minion, kill a squirrel or two, or do whatever you have to do to make ZeroZeroZero available on Amazon Prime Video here please? It sounds good, and we want to watch it. Cheers!

Then hit send. That should do the trick nicely :)