Peter Salmon

The party in After the Party (2023) is never shown whole. It comes in short bursts of warm, blurred light, a few seconds at a time, and the series keeps going back to it. Peter Salmon directs all six episodes, and he and his editor Denise Haratzis build each return so that it gives a few frames more and a different detail, and never quite the one Penny needs. Around it, Dave Cameron shoots Wellington in grey light, wind and sea spray, with Robyn Malcolm's Penny small against a hillside or a harbour. By the fourth episode we were leaning forward at every flashback, hunting the frame she was hunting, and were slightly cross with ourselves for being played so easily. It is a plain device and it works.

That plainness is the habit of a man who has spent most of his working life making other people's programmes. Salmon began with short films in the late 1990s and found his trade on Being Eve (2001–2002) for South Pacific Pictures, directing thirteen of its twenty-six episodes on his first proper job; he has said it is "still my favourite show I've ever made". There followed two decades of episodes on both sides of the Tasman: Outrageous Fortune and Go Girls in New Zealand, Rake, Offspring and Harrow in Australia, with children's and teen series such as Nowhere Boys (2013) alongside the adult drama. The turn came with Wanted, where he directed the second series and produced the third in 2018, and then INSiDE (2020), a short-form series he co-created. After the Party is the first thing he has both directed and produced from the ground up, through his company Luminous Beast, and he has since gone on to Madam (2024) and Watching You (2025).

What he does well is leave the actors alone. The camera is gently handheld and the cutting does not draw attention to itself, so a scene of two people disagreeing in a kitchen feels overheard rather than staged. He is good with a large cast, and After the Party, co-created with Malcolm and the writer Dianne Taylor, is uncomfortably fair to everyone in it, including the man Penny accused. The weakness is the one we named in our review and most critics noticed too: the last episode tidies up more than it should, and the ambiguity so carefully built across five hours is partly spent in the sixth.

So the question for Salmon the producer is whether he will hold his nerve where Salmon the director already does. He has shown he can make a series that refuses to tell us who to believe. We would like to see one that keeps refusing to the end.