Why everyone can (and should) join the composting revolution

Are you a time-poor urban apartment-dweller who’s put composting in the too-hard basket? Read on…

About half of what Aucklanders chuck in their rubbish bins is actually compostable material. That means a whopping 90,000 tonnes of Auckland households’ food waste ends up in landfill each year. Why is that a problem? It breaks down without oxygen and produces the potent greenhouse gas methane – and that, it goes without saying, is bad news. 

Composting, on the other hand, returns nutrients to the soil to support photosynthesis, which removes carbon from the atmosphere. For those reasons, composting is one of the most important things you, as an individual, can do to fight climate change. 

This is a point The Compost Collective, a collaborative project supported by Auckland Council, is trying to hammer home through the workshops it holds regularly throughout the city, as well as convincing doubters that composting really isn’t such a big deal. 

“A lot of people visualise this big messy compost bin in the corner of a yard, and as soon as they’ve got that picture, that’s it, they’ve ruled out any opportunity of being able to do it,” says Pip Beagley, who runs workshops on the North Shore through The Compost Collective.

Pip Beagley taking a bokashi workshop in Kumeu (Photo: Supplied)

A hefty traditional outdoor compost bin is just one of several methods you can learn in the workshops. Renters, those who live in units or apartments in the city or anyone without much outdoor space – which is increasing numbers of us in Tāmaki Makaurau – can do their bit for the climate just as successfully as those Aucklanders who have big suburban backyards. 

One option is ShareWaste, a resource that connects people who have food scraps with their neighbours who are already composting, worm farming or have chooks to feed. You can browse a map to see who’s near you, then send them a private message to arrange the transaction. Kind of like Tinder for composting. Of course, you can go the old-fashioned route by bypassing the website and simply asking around your neighbours, friends, family and workmates too.

In this scenario, you can keep your scraps in a basic compost caddy (top tip: in the sweltering summer months, put it in the fridge so it doesn’t get gross), or try out a bokashi system, which means less frequent toing and froing with your scraps.

If it’s warm and you’re not adding your scraps to your compost every day, keep it in the fridge (Photo: Supplied)

Bo-what now? Bokashi is a Japanese system that basically pickles your food waste to create nutrient-rich compost. A bin with holes sits inside another bin, you add your food scraps and cover it with a couple of spoonfuls of a bran-like “sprinkle” that contains microorganisms to kickstart the fermentation process, then squish it down (a potato masher works well) and close the airtight lid. Get in the habit of doing this every day, even if you only have a small number of scraps. Every two to three days, drain off the liquid that collects in the outside bin, which you can dilute and add to your plants, or tip down the toilet or sink to help keep them clean. When the bin’s full, close the lid and keep it in a warm place for 10 to 14 days (but keep draining off the liquid).  

Compost Collective workshop facilitator Jennifer Kerr says bokashi is her number one suggestion for apartment dwellers and others for whom space is an issue. “They’re very small and pretty simple – it can even go under your sink.”

Beagley likes to think of it as a storage unit. “It’s stored in a low-odour situation until you’re ready to deal with it, until you’ve got time to take it to your ShareWaste person or to the neighbours to be dug in.”

Yep that’s right, this is low-odour composting. “The best bokashis actually smell so good you almost want to eat it,” says Kerr. “In my workshops I pass around a sample of some bokashi juice and it smells almost like fruit punch – I have to tell people not to drink it!”

Hmm, that certainly wasn’t my experience when I attempted bokashi in my apartment, I admit – it kinda stunk. Beagley and Kerr are quick with the troubleshooting tips: was I adding fresh scraps every day, not letting them sit in a compost caddy to start going off before putting them in the bokashi? Ah, that could be the problem. Another piece of advice: if it does start to smell, just add more sprinkle. 

Bokashi being added to a traditional compost bin (Photo: Supplied)

Another benefit of bokashi is that it can take the vast majority of food waste, including meat and cooked and processed foods that other systems struggle with. Just make sure the scraps are in smallish pieces (golf ball-sized is a good guideline) and avoid liquids. 

Once your bokashi bin is full and has had its fortnight rest period, the solid waste needs to be dug into a garden or simply added to a traditional compost bin. You shouldn’t find it too hard to find someone via ShareWaste or your neighbourhood social network who’s keen to take it. 

Alternatively, see if there’s a community garden in your area – you could even get involved with your own plot. “Then you’re taking your scraps there and growing vegetables in it to take home – completing that natural cycle,” says Kerr.

For those who lack space, a worm farm is another option for dealing with food waste. Kerr and Beagley often suggest worm farms for families with children, as it’s a fascinating process for curious kids to get involved with. Worm farms produce castings (essentially worm poo) and “worm tea”, both of which are wonderful for the garden and you can share with grateful ShareWaste “hosts”. The downside is as worms are a bit fussy, you can’t add anything too spicy or acidic – citrus is out, for example.

A worm farm in action (Photo: Supplied)

The Compost Collective workshops are free to attend and if you go to one you’ll get a $40 discount code to spend on the composting system of your choice, which would take a bokashi bin and two bags of the “sprinkle” that will last you a year or so down to around $70, depending on size. Check out the website to find a workshop near you at a time that suits, or if you can’t make it in person, you can school yourself via the website and complete an online quiz, which will nab you a $28 discount. For an even cheaper option, The Compost Collective also holds workshops on how to make your own bokashi bin from scratch. 

So there’s no excuse not to join the composting revolution. “We try to emphasise how easy it is,” says Kerr. “By providing discounts on products it makes it more affordable, and they’re delivered so you don’t have to go out to get them. 

“We’ve taught you how to do it, and we’re always available – the contact details for the facilitators are on the website, and the Facebook page is a great place for support and follow-up – a lot of troubleshooting happens there.”

As Beagley says, in a time of uncertainty and fear around climate change, “it gives you the power. A lot of people are feeling worried and disempowered because the problem is so big – ’what can I do?’ But you can do a lot.”

This content was created in paid partnership with The Compost Collective. Learn more about our partnerships here.

Why you’ll no longer get offered a fridge to go back to your old power company

The government has announced a ban on electricity retailers using promotions to lure back customers who’ve changed companies. Flick Electric’s Nikki Cockburn explains why this is a victory for consumers and competition. 

Progress on the Electricity Price Review (EPR) might be slow – especially when it comes to putting recommendations into action – but yesterday things kicked up a notch. The Electricity Authority (EA) announced it’s imposing a rule that will mean power companies have to wait 180 days before they can contact customers who’ve jumped ship to a new retailer and dangle cheeky offers in front of them in the hopes they’ll tempt them back.

Known in the industry as winbacks, these special offers include things like fridges, cash, lower power prices, and even dirty old prompt payment discounts that are never offered to loyal, bill-paying customers – only those who decide to walk (and walk they should!)

These tactics might look good on the surface, especially for those who are proactive and engaged when it comes to switching retailers and finding the best deal. But in reality, winbacks have only helped to add to the problem of a two-tier market that advantages those who frequently switch retailers at the expense of those who don’t.

That’s because the research shows that while consumers who change retailers are rewarded by winbacks, benefitting from things like lower power prices and sparkly new electronic goods. But loyal customers who stay with the same retailer pay the price with higher charges that prop up the winbacks model. As outlined in the Government’s EPR response: “the average gap between the cheapest retailer’s price and the incumbent retailer’s price has risen about 50% since 2002.” While one tier benefits, the other tier suffers – and that’s plain unfair.

The EA’s ban means that retailers can’t offer customers winbacks for a period of 180 days after a customer has switched to another retailer. Hopefully, they’ll instead be more encouraged to offer their customers the best deals right off the bat and maybe even reward loyalty. 

And, for smaller, independent companies (like us!), the new ban will mean they have the time and opportunity to prove themselves to new customers on their own merits, without the bigger retailers cutting in. It’s good for competition and good for customers. 

The new ban comes into play on 31 March and we’re hopeful that it signals the start of some bigger, crucial industry and market changes that will have positive, ongoing effects for Kiwis. In three years the EA will review the changes to see if they’ve worked. 

It’s a win for consumers that will hopefully result in all power customers being treated fairly, rather than just those who shop around. And at Flick we’ve long campaigned for an end to winbacks and applaud the EA for taking strong action to make the market fairer for consumers. 

This content was created in paid partnership with Flick Electric. Learn more about our partnerships here.

Ten great TV shows, ten perfect TV performances

Our writers celebrate the best performances you can watch right now on NEON. Basically? They’re iconic.

We all love a good story, and a great plot twist can turn a mediocre TV show into addictive weekly viewing. But what really keeps us coming back are the characters, and seeing actors at the height of their power and talent working to bring those characters to us in vivid, fully-realised detail.

In celebration of that fact, we’ve raked across the bountiful harvest of television on NEON to pay homage not just to the great characters, but to the performers who dive deep and go long to bring those characters to you.

Brian Cox as Logan Roy in Succession

No one says “fuck off” quite like Logan Roy in Succession. Whether directed at one of his endlessly disappointing children, the paparazzi, a family therapist with a tough job ahead of him or a waiter who’s spilt some champagne, those two little words are always delivered with such withering disdain you can’t help but wince in sympathy. Played with gruff intensity by veteran Scottish actor Brian Cox, Logan Roy is the patriarch of a dysfunctional American media dynasty. One of the most compelling characters in a show full of compelling characters, he’s clinging desperately to power in the face of ill health, major business challenges and subordinate offspring, and in a single episode can swing from gentle and fatherly (“C’mon Shiv, talk to me”) to terrifying bully (“There are NO! FUCKING! RULES!”), with varying nuanced shades in between. Genius show, genius character, genius actor. / Alice Neville

Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter in His Dark Materials

In the very excellent source text of His Dark Materials, Mrs. Coulter is exactly as a child would view her: a terrifying villain, whose goals are clear but exactly what drives her is murky – as the actions of adults often are, even to their fellow adults. It’s a gift of a role for an actor, but also a potential enigma: what makes her as cruel as she is, and how is she able to hold warmth for Lyra while also, in no uncertain terms, being her jailer? Ruth Wilson, also tremendous in The Affair, dives into these complexities and revels in them. One of the best things about the adaptation is that we get to see Mrs. Coulter the way she sees herself: someone for whom complete control is the goal, whether it’s control of the world or her own emotions. So when she loses control, as she does in one brilliant scene early on when her daemon mauls Lyra’s, it’s a terrifying snapshot into a soul that has blackened itself into amorality.

It’s not the bigger moments where Wilson breaks loose and screams where she earns her pay cheque, it’s the ones where she has to bring herself back, realising that her goal of staying in control at all times is a dream, constantly out of her tightly-clenched grasp. / Sam Brooks

Iain Stirling as The Narrator on Love Island UK

In a show filled with beautiful people and rippling bodies, it’s ironic that Love Island UK’s greatest performance comes from someone we never set eyes on. Scottish comedian Iain Stirling narrates every episode of this reality TV juggernaut, and his self-deprecating humour and sarcastic one liners about the non-stop drama are an utter joy. Whether he’s dropping shade about an Islander’s questionable behaviour or mocking the contestants during one of the show’s completely bonkers challenges, Stirling’s wry observations celebrate how ridiculous Love Island UK can be. He brings the banter to the villa, which is just as well, given much of the show involves people looking for their soul mate while they catch giant pretzels on poles tied around their waists. It’s a mad old world, but like Iain Stirling reminds us six nights a week, that’s the power of love. / Tara Ward

Jared Harris as Valery Legasov in Chernobyl

A masterclass in understated screen acting, Jared Harris’s performance as Valery Legasov in Chernobyl has a haunting power that somehow lingers long after you’ve finished watching. He’s as close as we get to a hero in the HBO miniseries. The real Legasov was a kind of hero, though they turn it up a bit in the dramatisation. But even then it’s a stoic heroism, in muted colours.

There are glimpses in Harris’s performance of Lane Price, his pitch-perfect, pitiful, unbearably believable character in Mad Men. But Legasov is a long way from Price – he has a steel that the ad agency bean counter never did. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman before him, Harris has that ineffable quality of quietly extracting the humanity in flawed, weathered, complex, and ultimately tragic figures. He has a knack, too, of playing characters that, well, die. As he told the Guardian: “My wife said, ‘I can’t believe it. Why are they doing this to you again?’ It’s a problem career-wise.” / Toby Manhire

Jeremy Irons as Ozymandias in Watchmen

I binged all of Watchmen over Christmas like the fun-loving family gal that I am, and was completely enraptured by Jeremy Irons as Ozymandias. Playing the smartest man in the history of the world who is banished to live in a bizarre isolated manor, Irons is typically phenomenal and menacing for a brittle old guy who sometimes wears a cape. But it’s only as we begin to realise the true parameters of his groundhog day existence that Irons really dials it up to 11. And when I say dial it up to 11, I mean he unleashes an earth-shattering fart that Changes Everything. I’m not going to tell you why, or when, or how the fart comes to fruition, I’m just going to tell you that it has to be heard to be believed. / Alex Casey

Jim Carrey as Jeff Pickles in Kidding

It was probably my early-20s obsession with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which piqued my initial interest in Kidding, but it was Jim Carrey’s performance through the electric first season which set its hooks in my brain. Like that mumblecore classic, the show sees Carrey teaming up with surrealist French director Michel Gondry in a role near-perfectly suited to his talents, with his performance as Jeff Pickles giving the show a central figure who manifests tragicomedy in almost all facets of his life. 

He’s an omnipresent kids’ TV star dealing off-screen with the unresolved trauma of his own son’s death; a man seen by the world as a paragon of gentle goodness yet consumed by a barely concealed rage; and a deeply moral human who carries the weight of his influence heavily while his svengali father seeks to co opt and merchandise his name, likeness and even his voice in as many formats as can be found. As the show spirals, Carrey’s deft traverse of the gap between pain and catharsis becomes only more powerful. With his famously elastic face leaning less for the slapstick gurning of Ace Ventura than something similar to Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love, his Jeff Pickles is a very sad man who believes that if he can just keep smiling, maybe the world will stop collapsing. / Matthew McAuley

Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in Scandal 

For all that Scandal was written off as the sillier step-sibling of Netflix’s House of Cards, there’s no question that Scandal is the show that holds up better. While House of Cards feels impossibly dated now (not just because of the lead actor), Scandal is a perfectly-preserved piece of political soap opera. The show has a great ensemble cast, but Scandal’s main weapon is the rocket launcher at the centre: Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope. She tracks the character’s development from intelligent, competent, and still somewhat open-hearted fixer at the start of the show, into a diamond-tough, amoral operative by the end of its increasingly unhinged six seasons. She’s never less than compelling to watch, whether she’s reading a client the riot act or dangerously dangling a glass of red wine over white furniture. / SB

Regina Hall as Dawn Darcy in Black Monday

Perhaps because lionising financial titans is as unfashionable now as any time since the great depression, Black Monday made a small splash when it landed last year (and a second season is coming in March). But the story of the only black-led firm on Wall Street deserved more shine than it got, evoking the coked-out kinetic energy of the decade in a pop, almost cartoonish style.

The cast is crazy, including Don Cheadle, Paul Scheer and Girls’ Andrew Rannells, but it’s Regina Hall who is the show’s emotional and dramatic core. She plays Dawn Darcy, who carries the double weight of being black and a woman in one of the most racist and sexist environments on earth, and delivers a deft, resonant performance. It ultimately reveals that, just as Mad Men was ultimately about Peggy and not Don, Black Monday’s star is not Cheadle’s Maurice Monroe, but is instead driven forward by Dawn’s combination of intellect, calculation and magnetism. / Duncan Greive

Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars in Veronica Mars

Some actors find their character over time, developing and taking hold of the role as the show throws more plot at them and deepens the narrative waters. Others find their character right from the start, like Kristen Bell with Veronica Mars, a remarkable achievement given that the role was more or less her first big break. Veronica is there from the get-go – a hard-boiled, noir-inspired teen detective, as quick with her snark as she is with her stun gun, and with a permanent high-school-shaped chip on her shoulder.

The stealth joy of Bell’s performance is how she found new angles in the character, especially in the fourth season when she started to drop her guard and show us a Veronica who wasn’t just ready to love, but desperately in need of it. It’s one of the best television performances of the new millennium, and one that’s easy to forget because of how brilliant it was right from the jump. / SB

David Schwimmer as Captain Herbert Sobel in Band of Brothers

No such thing as small roles, as they say. And despite Schwimmer only appearing in three episodes of the 10 episode miniseries, he remains one of the most memorable parts of it all. Playing the ruthless disciplinarian Captain Sobel, he veers wildly between being a towering figure of authority, and an incompetent buffoon. 

Throughout his short stint in the show, Schwimmer gives the briefest flashes of vulnerability, before losing everything that matters to him. It’s a performance that hints at much greater complexities in the human being below the surface. But isn’t that the way with organisations that operate along military lines, when discipline is required to flatten out individuality. After going through that, otherwise sensitive people can be contorted into grotesque new shapes and destroyed, a process that is portrayed brilliantly by Schwimmer in just a few short cameos. / Alex Braae

This content was created in paid partnership with NEON. Learn more about our partnerships here. 

---

To watch amazing shows like the above plus loads more, subscribe to NEON here. 

Ten great TV shows, ten perfect TV performances

Our writers celebrate the best performances you can watch right now on NEON. Basically? They’re iconic.

We all love a good story, and a great plot twist can turn a mediocre TV show into addictive weekly viewing. But what really keeps us coming back are the characters, and seeing actors at the height of their power and talent working to bring those characters to us in vivid, fully-realised detail.

In celebration of that fact, we’ve raked across the bountiful harvest of television on NEON to pay homage not just to the great characters, but to the performers who dive deep and go long to bring those characters to you.

Brian Cox as Logan Roy in Succession

No one says “fuck off” quite like Logan Roy in Succession. Whether directed at one of his endlessly disappointing children, the paparazzi, a family therapist with a tough job ahead of him or a waiter who’s spilt some champagne, those two little words are always delivered with such withering disdain you can’t help but wince in sympathy. Played with gruff intensity by veteran Scottish actor Brian Cox, Logan Roy is the patriarch of a dysfunctional American media dynasty. One of the most compelling characters in a show full of compelling characters, he’s clinging desperately to power in the face of ill health, major business challenges and subordinate offspring, and in a single episode can swing from gentle and fatherly (“C’mon Shiv, talk to me”) to terrifying bully (“There are NO! FUCKING! RULES!”), with varying nuanced shades in between. Genius show, genius character, genius actor. / Alice Neville

Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter in His Dark Materials

In the very excellent source text of His Dark Materials, Mrs. Coulter is exactly as a child would view her: a terrifying villain, whose goals are clear but exactly what drives her is murky – as the actions of adults often are, even to their fellow adults. It’s a gift of a role for an actor, but also a potential enigma: what makes her as cruel as she is, and how is she able to hold warmth for Lyra while also, in no uncertain terms, being her jailer? Ruth Wilson, also tremendous in The Affair, dives into these complexities and revels in them. One of the best things about the adaptation is that we get to see Mrs. Coulter the way she sees herself: someone for whom complete control is the goal, whether it’s control of the world or her own emotions. So when she loses control, as she does in one brilliant scene early on when her daemon mauls Lyra’s, it’s a terrifying snapshot into a soul that has blackened itself into amorality.

It’s not the bigger moments where Wilson breaks loose and screams where she earns her pay cheque, it’s the ones where she has to bring herself back, realising that her goal of staying in control at all times is a dream, constantly out of her tightly-clenched grasp. / Sam Brooks

Iain Stirling as The Narrator on Love Island UK

In a show filled with beautiful people and rippling bodies, it’s ironic that Love Island UK’s greatest performance comes from someone we never set eyes on. Scottish comedian Iain Stirling narrates every episode of this reality TV juggernaut, and his self-deprecating humour and sarcastic one liners about the non-stop drama are an utter joy. Whether he’s dropping shade about an Islander’s questionable behaviour or mocking the contestants during one of the show’s completely bonkers challenges, Stirling’s wry observations celebrate how ridiculous Love Island UK can be. He brings the banter to the villa, which is just as well, given much of the show involves people looking for their soul mate while they catch giant pretzels on poles tied around their waists. It’s a mad old world, but like Iain Stirling reminds us six nights a week, that’s the power of love. / Tara Ward

Jared Harris as Valery Legasov in Chernobyl

A masterclass in understated screen acting, Jared Harris’s performance as Valery Legasov in Chernobyl has a haunting power that somehow lingers long after you’ve finished watching. He’s as close as we get to a hero in the HBO miniseries. The real Legasov was a kind of hero, though they turn it up a bit in the dramatisation. But even then it’s a stoic heroism, in muted colours.

There are glimpses in Harris’s performance of Lane Price, his pitch-perfect, pitiful, unbearably believable character in Mad Men. But Legasov is a long way from Price – he has a steel that the ad agency bean counter never did. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman before him, Harris has that ineffable quality of quietly extracting the humanity in flawed, weathered, complex, and ultimately tragic figures. He has a knack, too, of playing characters that, well, die. As he told the Guardian: “My wife said, ‘I can’t believe it. Why are they doing this to you again?’ It’s a problem career-wise.” / Toby Manhire

Jeremy Irons as Ozymandias in Watchmen

I binged all of Watchmen over Christmas like the fun-loving family gal that I am, and was completely enraptured by Jeremy Irons as Ozymandias. Playing the smartest man in the history of the world who is banished to live in a bizarre isolated manor, Irons is typically phenomenal and menacing for a brittle old guy who sometimes wears a cape. But it’s only as we begin to realise the true parameters of his groundhog day existence that Irons really dials it up to 11. And when I say dial it up to 11, I mean he unleashes an earth-shattering fart that Changes Everything. I’m not going to tell you why, or when, or how the fart comes to fruition, I’m just going to tell you that it has to be heard to be believed. / Alex Casey

Jim Carrey as Jeff Pickles in Kidding

It was probably my early-20s obsession with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which piqued my initial interest in Kidding, but it was Jim Carrey’s performance through the electric first season which set its hooks in my brain. Like that mumblecore classic, the show sees Carrey teaming up with surrealist French director Michel Gondry in a role near-perfectly suited to his talents, with his performance as Jeff Pickles giving the show a central figure who manifests tragicomedy in almost all facets of his life. 

He’s an omnipresent kids’ TV star dealing off-screen with the unresolved trauma of his own son’s death; a man seen by the world as a paragon of gentle goodness yet consumed by a barely concealed rage; and a deeply moral human who carries the weight of his influence heavily while his svengali father seeks to co opt and merchandise his name, likeness and even his voice in as many formats as can be found. As the show spirals, Carrey’s deft traverse of the gap between pain and catharsis becomes only more powerful. With his famously elastic face leaning less for the slapstick gurning of Ace Ventura than something similar to Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love, his Jeff Pickles is a very sad man who believes that if he can just keep smiling, maybe the world will stop collapsing. / Matthew McAuley

Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope in Scandal 

For all that Scandal was written off as the sillier step-sibling of Netflix’s House of Cards, there’s no question that Scandal is the show that holds up better. While House of Cards feels impossibly dated now (not just because of the lead actor), Scandal is a perfectly-preserved piece of political soap opera. The show has a great ensemble cast, but Scandal’s main weapon is the rocket launcher at the centre: Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope. She tracks the character’s development from intelligent, competent, and still somewhat open-hearted fixer at the start of the show, into a diamond-tough, amoral operative by the end of its increasingly unhinged six seasons. She’s never less than compelling to watch, whether she’s reading a client the riot act or dangerously dangling a glass of red wine over white furniture. / SB

Regina Hall as Dawn Darcy in Black Monday

Perhaps because lionising financial titans is as unfashionable now as any time since the great depression, Black Monday made a small splash when it landed last year (and a second season is coming in March). But the story of the only black-led firm on Wall Street deserved more shine than it got, evoking the coked-out kinetic energy of the decade in a pop, almost cartoonish style.

The cast is crazy, including Don Cheadle, Paul Scheer and Girls’ Andrew Rannells, but it’s Regina Hall who is the show’s emotional and dramatic core. She plays Dawn Darcy, who carries the double weight of being black and a woman in one of the most racist and sexist environments on earth, and delivers a deft, resonant performance. It ultimately reveals that, just as Mad Men was ultimately about Peggy and not Don, Black Monday’s star is not Cheadle’s Maurice Monroe, but is instead driven forward by Dawn’s combination of intellect, calculation and magnetism. / Duncan Greive

Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars in Veronica Mars

Some actors find their character over time, developing and taking hold of the role as the show throws more plot at them and deepens the narrative waters. Others find their character right from the start, like Kristen Bell with Veronica Mars, a remarkable achievement given that the role was more or less her first big break. Veronica is there from the get-go – a hard-boiled, noir-inspired teen detective, as quick with her snark as she is with her stun gun, and with a permanent high-school-shaped chip on her shoulder.

The stealth joy of Bell’s performance is how she found new angles in the character, especially in the fourth season when she started to drop her guard and show us a Veronica who wasn’t just ready to love, but desperately in need of it. It’s one of the best television performances of the new millennium, and one that’s easy to forget because of how brilliant it was right from the jump. / SB

David Schwimmer as Captain Herbert Sobel in Band of Brothers

No such thing as small roles, as they say. And despite Schwimmer only appearing in three episodes of the 10 episode miniseries, he remains one of the most memorable parts of it all. Playing the ruthless disciplinarian Captain Sobel, he veers wildly between being a towering figure of authority, and an incompetent buffoon. 

Throughout his short stint in the show, Schwimmer gives the briefest flashes of vulnerability, before losing everything that matters to him. It’s a performance that hints at much greater complexities in the human being below the surface. But isn’t that the way with organisations that operate along military lines, when discipline is required to flatten out individuality. After going through that, otherwise sensitive people can be contorted into grotesque new shapes and destroyed, a process that is portrayed brilliantly by Schwimmer in just a few short cameos. / Alex Braae

This content was created in paid partnership with NEON. Learn more about our partnerships here. 

---

To watch amazing shows like the above plus loads more, subscribe to NEON here.