Ah the days of the video store. I’ve only just realised now how many times I visited the video store over the years before the digital age takeover.
New Zealand web series The Video Store focuses on the struggles of running a video store in today’s society. The act of visiting a video store will most likely be familiar to everyone, even if they haven’t visited one in years. The interesting thing about The Video Store is its exploration into a business that dominated for years but now struggles to stay afloat.
Although The Video Store is certainly a comedy with quirky dialogue and funny banter, I wouldn’t necessarily list it as a dark comedy as mentioned in the official blurb for the webseries, but that’s just my own opinion and one that I questioned after googling dark comedy by definition.
Local content is hard to come by, especially in a smaller country such as New Zealand. When you do come across it though, it’s familiar and somewhat ‘homely’. It seems an odd thing to mention, but in a world where Hollywood dominates film and television, you don’t realise your home country has its own quirks and familiarities. The Video Store certainly embodies various aspects of being a ‘kiwi’ but also keeps it general with characteristics that others around the world would enjoy too.
When working on a webseries with a small budget, it makes sense for The Video Store to be dominantly set in one location. That location being, you guessed it, a video store. There’s probably no point expanding to further locations because of time constraints and production value.
I did enjoy when they did though. One of the episodes that I enjoyed was when two of The Video Store workers ate ‘gone off’ lollies that put them in a sort of hallucinogenic state. Because of this, the two workers ‘experienced’ the sections of each genre e.g. Fantasy or musical, which was a fun way to change things up.
The Video Store embodies the authentic charm of a Kiwi video store we’ve all come to remember. Though it may be lacking in variety, some considerations should be taken into account for the limitations of a web series.