Mark DeFriest
With over 800 hours of television credits across a nearly four-decade career, California-born producer and director Mark DeFriest freely credits his time in New Zealand as the apprenticeship that gave him his career. Arriving at Lower Hutt's Avalon Studios in 1977 to helm twice-weekly drama Close to Home, he became the youngest director in New Zealand television at the age of only 26.
"I made a lot of television, good and bad, at the New Zealand taxpayers' expense," DeFriest recalls. Becoming part of the Television One whānau at Avalon led to working on iconic local comedies, dramas and documentaries — even a live Telethon — before heading back to Australia and a career on big name and award-winning shows like Carson's Law and The Flying Doctors, and international productions such as Flipper (starring a young Jessica Alba) and the Doctor Who spin-off, K9.
Avalon in 1977 wasn’t DeFriest’s first time in New Zealand. His father was posted to Wellington for work in 1960, meaning the young DeFriest spent a few years at school in Karori before they relocated to Kenya and then Ghana.
Back in California and at college, DeFriest thought he might embark on a radio career, until a chance encounter with a news broadcast van led him to the world of live TV. He began running cables and moving sets for hits like Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, but it was the master control room that captivated him: "I'm a little embarrassed to say, but I wanted to be a television news director."
Then a call from his father after DeFriest turned down a scholarship to the UCLA film school changed the course of his life — "I wanted to do stuff. I didn't want to learn anymore. Now, arguably, if I'd gone to UCLA … I would have understood more, sooner." The elder DeFriest, then living in Melbourne, leveraged his social connections to set up a meeting with legendary Australian producer Hector Crawford.
Crawford Productions were responsible for a vast amount of Australia's drama output in the early 1970s, specialising in cop shows like Homicide, Division 4 and Matlock Police. "The only time I ever wore a suit in the business was that one day," DeFriest remembers, but something about him must have impressed Crawford because he was offered a job as a first assistant director. From there — despite knowing almost nothing himself — he was able to see and absorb the work of everyone else on the production.
DeFriest thinks his American accent might have led everyone to believe that this 21-year-old knew more than he did, but he stayed in the role for three years, until Australian television fashions changed, cop shows lost popularity, and he talked his way into actually directing some episodes of Crawford's new soap opera, The Box.
New Zealand television director John Barningham was by now working for Crawford and advised DeFriest he had gone about as far in Australia as he was going to go at his age and that the new frontier was New Zealand, which now had two TV channels. He jumped the ditch, and ended up being so popular on the production of Close to Home that star Pat Evison intervened directly with the Minister of Immigration to get him permanent residency when his six-month contract (and visa) expired.
Barningham was also instrumental socially, later introducing DeFriest to "New Zealand's queen of cabaret" Bridgette Allen at Avalon's social club. They hit it off and married in 1979, featuring regularly in media stories during that period. "We were on the front cover of the magazines and stuff," DeFriest recalls. "I was famous in my own lunchbox. I enjoyed it."
Being one of the core producing team at Avalon meant working on whatever TV1 required, including directing episodes of one of New Zealand's first sitcoms, Joe and Koro, starring Stephen Gledhill as a recent English migrant and Rawiri Paratene as a young chip shop worker.
DeFriest remembers: "I got the job because I was the guy standing there when everyone else stepped back, I guess. The reason why I say it like that is because comedy is the hardest of all. Drama … you can make it look pretty, good music, great shots, CGI … If comedy isn't funny, you're standing there with your pants around your ankles. You're buggered."
A happier assignment shooting an episode of Country Calendar in the Mackenzie Country led to another great leap forward for DeFriest's career. On the shores of Lake Tekapo, his realisation "we need to do something with this giant God-given set that we've got" spawned the one-off 1980 drama High Country, about ageing patriarch (Derek Hardwick) choosing to sell his Hereford stud to an ambitious outsider (Peter McCauley).
The programme was well-received but DeFriest was disappointed in how it looked. The production method at the time was to shoot exteriors on 16mm film and the interior scenes on videotape using multiple cameras in the studio. When he pitched a spin-off series to TV1's head of drama Michael Scott-Smith, he asked for it be shot entirely on film, making it — as NZ On Screen puts it — a "blue ribbon drama series".
In High Country, Bruce Allpress played the supporting role of Jocko, an itinerant stockman and honest jack-of-all-trades, but his performance immediately impressed DeFriest — not to mention that they got along extremely well — and so Jocko, the series, was born before High Country had even aired.
In an interview with the Evening Post, DeFriest admitted that "the ratings for this series haven't been great" but that the show's greenlit second series would "have stronger narrative lines and a lot more action." As producer, DeFriest had got his wish to make a show that was more cinematic and was even able to persuade feature film director Roger Donaldson to direct a couple of episodes.
While High Country was described as a "contemporary western", Jocko was a half-hour "dramedy". "It was really a comedy of sorts," DeFriest recalls, "but I didn't lay on the comedy, it sort of just happened."
As producer, DeFriest tended to stay away from the set ("As a director, I don't like it when the producer sits down for the day, I feel like I've been directing by committee.") but on the day Allpress was shooting a sheep shearing scene, DeFriest was present and took a shine to a striped singlet worn by one of the watching shearers. Allpress put it on, wearing it for the rest of the day's filming, and it became a key piece of costume for Jocko, who can be seen wearing it in the episode on NZ On Screen.
During 1981, while overseeing Jocko, DeFriest was also helping to develop the first season of the popular kidult drama Sea Urchins, going on to direct some early episodes. But his final show at Avalon may have been his most challenging — satirical social commentary Free Enterprise, part of a series of one-off productions under the banner Loose Enz. Written by Greg McGee and produced by Tony Isaac, it was set in a run-down Wellington café with cantankerous Dot (Kate Harcourt) behind the counter.
DeFriest recalls struggling with the drama but being looked after by Isaacs: "I was like 10 minutes short in screen time from the written script. I think it was 30 minutes long and he said, well you're at 22 and maybe there would be commercials? No idea, I was way out of my depth and Tony patiently stuck with me — ‘Settle down, you don't have to rush through this thing'."
In 1982 the relative lack of opportunity in New Zealand meant it was time for DeFriest to return to Australia, where he would forge a successful career directing and producing — "contracted 14 months a year", as he puts it — and wouldn't return to work in Aotearoa until he was asked to direct two episodes of The Adventures of Black Stallion (starring Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney) in 1992. The following year he ventured back out on the water for six episodes of the kidult adventure series Deepwater Haven.
"I got the job [on Black Stallion] not because I'm an absolutely stunning director. I got it because it was a New Zealand, Australian and Canadian co-production. The fact of the matter is that I have residency in all those countries so that you get the government subsidies in all those countries."
In keeping with that modesty, DeFriest acknowledges the New Zealand television people who supported him in those early Avalon days: John Barningham and David Stevens (writer on Breaker Morant and The Sum of Us) who encouraged him to come to New Zealand; head of drama Michael Scott-Smith who "gave me freedom I hadn't even asked for, it was handed to me"; programmer Des Monaghan ("Whatever we did got far better ratings. I'm not saying our stuff was any better. It's just that it was programmed better"); and executive producer Ross Jennings, who was best man at DeFriest's wedding.
DeFriest now lives in Perth, Western Australia, where he can indulge in his passion for windsurfing. He has no regrets about not trying to make it in Hollywood. Whenever he would visit, he could see the toll that life was taking on freelance directors: "I ended up with the Malibu view without Americans. I can windsurf up to my front door and I've got a woman that I love passionately. It's kind of all fallen into place."
Profile written by Dan Slevin, published 12 March 2026
Sources include
Mark DeFriest
Juliet Hensley, 'Producer keeps eye on Jocko', The Evening Post, 12 November 1981
Unknown writer, 'Drama 1982 - Free Enterprise', Listener TV Annual, 27 March 1982
Unknown writer, 'And here’s the Bridget that nightclub audiences never see', NZ Women’s Weekly, 30 November 1981
Unknown writer, 'Jocko gives producer joy', The Dominion, 21 October 1981
Unknown writer, 'A long haul up the mountain', NZ Listener, 14 February 1981
Unknown writer, 'Jocko', Listener TV Annual, 1981
Unknown writer, 'Sea Urchins', Junior Listener, 1981
Unknown writer, 'The backbone of this country', NZ Listener, 1980
Unknown writer, 'Wedding bells for our Queen of Cabaret', Sunday News, 1979
Unknown writer, 'The workaday world of Close to Home', NZ Listener, 20 May 1978