Actor, writer and director Harry McNaughton takes us through his life in television.
Years after leaving Shortland Street, Harry McNaughton still can’t watch himself on the small screen. Having played hospital receptionist Gerald Tippett on Shortland Street for five dramatic years, he finds it difficult when vintage clips of him on the long-running soap pop up on the internet. “It’s quite confronting to watch yourself as an 18-year-old, particularly since I was six foot two, but I looked about 12,” he laughs over Zoom. “It’s like watching a giant man-child dressed in a three piece suit, stumbling around doing some things that he thinks are quite funny.”
McNaughton has come a long way since leaving Ferndale, establishing himself as a writer, producer and showrunner on a variety of New Zealand television shows. From The Pact to Madam, Under the Vines to The Sounds, McNaughton has championed bringing New Zealand stories to the screen. Now he stars in Happiness, a musical comedy about an uptight Broadway director who returns home to Tauranga, moves in with his mum, and reluctantly finds himself involved with the local musical theatre company.
After many years behind the camera, McNaughton admits he took some convincing to return to his acting roots and play the lead role of Charlie in Happiness. He said no to the audition three times, but was won over by the show’s humorous script and light-hearted charm. He stars alongside local acting legends Rebecca Gibney and Peter Hambleton and a strong ensemble cast who bring the all-singing, all-dancing series alive. “I just exist to set up their punchlines, which makes me so happy,” McNaughton says.
He also reckons there’s no better time for a show like Happiness on our screens. “The idea of a show that exists just to bring people joy is quite neat, and the ability to make something like Happiness was so joyful”. Making Happiness was an “extraordinary” experience, McNaughton adds, partly because he believes his character Charlie is the first gay male lead in a New Zealand primetime television series. “It seems crazy that it’s 2025 and we’re only just getting there, but that was incredible.”
We sat down with McNaughton for an equally extraordinary conversation about his life in television, including his TV guilty pleasure, an early love of Captain Planet and the sheer terror of his real-life Shortland Street cliffhanger.
My earliest TV memory is… Watching Captain Planet at home. I was only allowed to watch half an hour of TV a week, which probably says a lot about why I’m in this industry. I remember being transported. I was a massive reader, and I remember that feeling of, “oh, this is like a book, plus some”.
The TV show I loved when I was younger was… An HBO show called In Treatment. It was quite a formative show for me. Gabriel Byrne played a therapist, and it was just two people in a room. It was theatrical, but also inherently cinematic in the way it was shot and almost in real time. It was fucking with form and fucking with episodic structure. Nothing happened, it was just two people talking for half an hour. I couldn’t believe they could make something like that and still have it be compelling.
My earliest TV crush was… Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions was a vibe.
The TV moment that haunts me is… Hanging off a cliff in Shortland Street. We never got to do stunts, so it was really exciting. I remember being so stoked about it, like “I’m going to do my own stunts, this is awesome, this is everything I want to do”. Then when I was hanging off the cliff, I realised I was terrified. I had to act terrified, so that probably wasn’t hard as it could have been.
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… I spent a lot of time as a kid thinking about those drunk driving ads, because they were so powerful. I’ve since learned it was a strategy of shock and awe, and then they moved into slightly more comic areas just like a show does with a narrative and a genre shift. Oh, and togs, togs, undies.
My guilty pleasure TV show is… The West Wing. Kip Chapman, the incredible creator of Happiness, loves doing a West Wing re-watch every couple of years, and I’ve just started doing that. My memory is of stunning, scintillating dialogue, paced perfectly and those big, long tracking shots, all of which still exist. But my lord, the show is soppier than I realised. There’s some pretty unforgivable sap in there. It’s not as impartial as it likes to pretend to be, and it’s more problematic than I realised in depictions of women. You’ve got the amazing Alison Janney, but in terms of a multiplicity of representations of women, it had a wee way to go.
My favourite TV moment from my own career is… The argument between Charlie and Gaye in Happiness. The scene meant a lot to both Rebecca Gibney and me, but we were shooting an episode a week with full dance numbers and I was in almost every scene, so I was exhausted. We thought it was going to be an angry scene, but the first time we read it together, we both burst into tears. We were crying for two and a half hours on set, which was not at all what I thought the scene was going to be. We went with it, and it was beautiful. It turned into a scene with a mother and a son who love each other, a scene about how much you can hurt the other person and not mean to. I loved it.
What I wish people knew about making television is… How collaborative it can be. From the outside, TV can be hierarchical and an ego game, where you talk about who’s got top billing and whose face is on TV the most. For me, having spent my entire adult life in TV, it’s a family. The shows that run well are incredibly ego-less, and everyone works together to make this product that’s the sum of its parts.
My favourite TV project was… The Pact. My husband and I had set up this production company and I was head writer at Shortland Street, and I decided that I was going to throw it all in and make a TV show. We self-funded it, remortgaged the house to do it. It was terrifying. I was so invested in the outcome, and then so bloody proud of it. It lived as this big, beautiful thing.
My most watched TV show of all time is… I probably watched each episode of The Pact 100 times, and each episode of Madam 50 times. It’s insane how much it lives in you.
My controversial TV opinion is… I think New Zealand punches so far above its weight in TV, and I think we’re hard on ourselves. We absolutely should be, because that way lies brightness, but we should congratulate ourselves for the shows that are getting funded. New Zealand on Air is funding some really adventurous stuff and networks like Three are commissioning really exciting stuff. This is a time where the rest of the world is struggling to get any shows up, and the shows that are getting made are cozy fucking crime dramas. Unpopular TV opinion: I never want to watch any cozy crime.
The last thing I watched on TV was… The West Wing. I was deep in that last night, and before that, The White Lotus. I’m fascinated by the slow burn of White Lotus. It’s been interesting to see people talking about how slow it is and how they haven’t enjoyed that. That’s the joy of watching it as another maker and being like, “oh, this is a bold move. Is it going to pay off?”
Every episode of Happiness is available on ThreeNow.
