800 WORDS
Airs Tuesday July 4th at 9pm
An Australian columnist, recently widowed, uproots his family and moves to a remote New Zealand seaside town for a fresh start.
George is one of those guys who appears to skate through life. He's got it all: a beautiful wife, happy kids and a great job as a newspaper columnist, but the laws of the universe say you shouldn't count on anything lasting forever. When tragedy strikes and George's wife suddenly dies, his life is thrown completely off balance.
800 WORDS begins with him making the rash decision to uproot his life and his kids, moving them from the bustling city of Sydney and relocating them to the quaint town of Weld, New Zealand. All he wants is to make a fresh start, but it seems that his kids, the townspeople and the universe have other ideas.
FILMING LOCATIONS
Beautiful beaches and quirky locals characterize the New Zealand small town of Weld. It is a place where everyone knows each other and there is an excess of beautiful, single women. Only, Weld isn't real.
Thanks to the popularity 800 WORDS, some people are inquiring as to Weld's whereabouts. "Apparently, Aussies pop into the Arataki Visitors Centre saying, "We want to go to Weld," says the show's star Erik Thomson. The center is in the Waitakere Ranges, close to the West Auckland beaches of Piha and Muriwai which are used as locations for the filming of 800 Words. "There is a little bit of Weld tourism happening but this part of New Zealand isn't the most famous part of New Zealand," says Thomson. "Everyone heads to the South Island for Lord Of The Rings. But Auckland's west coast beaches are magnificent and rugged and interesting. I think a lot of people realize that there is so much more to New Zealand than mountains and lakes."
