This Touchdown reality series puts a Kiwi family in the shoes of a family of 1852 English immigrants to Canterbury. The challenge for the Huttons is to see if they have the 'pioneer spirit' and can live with colonial clothing, housing and food for 10 weeks. From a gentler, non-competitive era of reality TV, this first episode sees the Owaka family of six (including baby Neil) experience six days of life on a settler ship – seasickness, food rations, restrictive clothing and bedding and chamber pots – while relaying their personal reflections to the camera.

In this 2012 series, media personality Jaquie Brown chronicles a year as a young mother, as she raises her first child Leo. With a single rule — not to offer advice — Brown aimed to document honestly the realities of modern parenting. This first episode looks at everything from worrying nipple advice to installing car seats, from the pelvic floor to the post-baby body. Brown's candid reflections (captured in video diary 'Little Brother') are mixed with experts (Plunket nurses, baby whisperers), and a look at Kiwi child-rearing social history. The show was produced by JAM TV for TV One.

Pioneering woman director Kathleen O’Brien looks at NZ Correspondence School education in this 25-minute National Film Unit short. Lessons are sent from the school’s Wellington base to far-flung outposts, for farm kids and sick kids, prisoners and immigrants, from Nuie to Northland. Letters, radio and an annual ‘residential college’ at Massey connect students and teachers. In a newspaper report of the time, O’Brien remembering being stranded at Cape Brett lighthouse “for four days without a toothbrush and wearing only the clothes she stood up in”.