The Insiders Guide to Happiness - Does Happiness Grow Up? (Chapter Eleven)

The series follows the interweaving lives of eight fascinating characters - a guilt-ridden ghost (Matthew) who has been run over after cheating on his fiancée, a woman who wins millions in a lottery but still can't get her boyfriend to love her, a pregnant widow, a self-serving news presenter and a bogan seemingly possessed by the spirit of a Buddhist monk, to name just a few.

Each is forced to face themselves after experiencing a great loss. In picking up the pieces of their lives, they embark on the search for that most mysterious and elusive thing: happiness.

The apparently disparate stories are linked together by Matthew's omniscient voice-over and a whimsical narrative that references everything from chaos theory (butterflies appear in the series as a motif) to the self-help manual Matthew unearths in a library just hours before his death (each episode is framed around a pop-philosophical question such as, "Who Controls Your Happiness?").

This series showcased an ensemble of then-emerging acting talent, including Madeleine Sami, Sophia Hawthorne, Paolo Rotondo, Will Hall, Fasitua Amosa and Fraser Brown. Created by Peter Cox (a recently graduated creative writing student), and bought and developed by the Gibson Group, the series works brilliantly because of its freshness of voice, originality and general coolness.

It has been compared to Australian TV series The Secret Life of Us, another show that successfully engaged with contemporary twenty-something culture, but The Insider's Guide to Happiness is a thing all of its own: sophisticated, assured (the mystical elements are finely handled) and never derivative.

This is perhaps one of the reasons, along with effervescent performances, grungy Wellington settings stylishly photographed, and great NZ music, that the series found such popularity with audiences. Particularly a young audience grateful to see themselves authentically portrayed on our TV screens. The production even used real butterflies - no CGI (computer-generated images) here, folks!

The Insiders Guide To Happiness sold to Australia, Finland and the United States. At the 2005 New Zealand Screen Awards, Happiness took away seven gongs - Best Drama Series, Director (Mark Beesley), Script (David Brechin-Smith), Music (David Long), plus  awards for actors Will Hall, Jason Whyte and Denise O'Connell.