6 Part Ed Hillary drama on TV1 & OnDemand

yeah the young maori girl /lady seemed to intimate at an early possible love interest theat never went further than talking and making eyes at each other, what was the point in taking up screen time with that scenario given all the other far bigger topics that could be covered in the drama. and the school PE instructor, he wouldnt be the first capable athlete written off by an insensitive PE instrcutor, it was a scene from just about anyones life... there was no indication what effect if any it had on sir ed , so why include it? they are trying to show a lot of acets from his life that arent really adding to the overal story but subtract from the time that can be spent on the bigger issues. i dont recall reading about abny bitterness over ed enlisting, so i dont know how much they played that up, the war was a finite part of his life, and it didnt really play that much part in teh rest of his life, so you're getting these dead end stories being put into the series. its like a series of disconnected scenes

I watched episode 2 last night. I'm not hating it, but I'm not sure it's improved much for me over ep 1. I can't quite place it but the storytelling seems fairly shallow as if they're just acting out selected bits of a sequence of events, and leaving big gaps between it all. eg. The narrative suddenly jumps from NZ to Nepal with almost no difference except a couple of characters speaking no English. A big deal's made of Earle Riddiford joining the Shipton expedition with Ed Hillary in 1951, but he immediately disappears from the story as soon as they've met Shipton. Next year George Lowe's back again, but there's no explanation of how this happened. It's a bit of a shame. I like the idea of the series and I don't want to trivialise the effort needed to produce this sort of thing, but keep thinking it could have been better.

yup. trying to put too much into the plot... waters down the scenes and continuity...

Yeah the second episode really sucked. Acting bad. Plot bad. Just really bad. I'm over it.

theres some interesting content, but they are trying to make most of the scenes into dramas, it paints a false impression of what Sir ed was like, making him look over serious and too into the politics that was going on around him..

It's messy. The are making Sir Ed look petulant and temperamental, not determined and single minded. There's no questioning the role Louise played in his life and the devastating effect her (and Belinda's) death had on him. But the way Episode One started by flashing forward to the site of the plane crash almost hints that they are heading for that as a pivotal moment to hinge his life around. (Dickie Attenborough did the same thing in Gandhi) The acting is certainly pretty weak...B grade in places. Climbing scenes are laughable so far. Was that Broken River ski-field used as a poor stand in for their first meeting with Shipton? The only upside is Amy Usherwood is beautiful ;)

I won't be watching it, having read the books and being a big fan of Sir Ed. I did get the opportunity to meet and converse with him on one occasion but he was frail at that time with a chest infection. The reason I'm a big fan is that when he was working on the power schemes, he stood up to a load of shirkers and took on the physical task they were paid to do while the rest of them carried on playing cards etc. That takes cajones and he had it in spades.

I could tolerate cheaper production quality and simplistic scenery if the story and drama were good, but it doesn't seem to be. To be fair to the actors, there's not much to work with. At times it's as if someone decided the script needed to be shorter and so blindly tore out every second page.

Directed by Danny Mulheron, probably most recognised for his time on TV as a comedian http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0611833/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

i think the series redeemed itself in episode 3, when they climbed everest. It was a really good watch. the next episode they follow the trip to the south pole, hopefully that is another good episode. After that who knows, they've already given a glimpse of the death of Rose and his daughter , that event cast a very long shadow on his life I ran into Sir ed at work once... but it was in a business environment and i was a junior nobody and it wasnt my place to talk to him, and i was in total awe of him. he was there for a formal meeting, ironical, i was the one person in the room who could relate to his outdoor achievements, i had climbed at least one peak he did, Mt Tapuae-o-Uenuku.