Jemaine and Bret’s Stateside Legacy

The legacy of Flight of the Conchords has been the creation of a new stereotype for New Zealanders travelling in the US, writes James Robinson. Robinson, a New Zealand journalist who lives in San Francisco, says although it’s been four years since the last the Flight of the Conchords episode, the show still has cultural legs in America. “The collective weight of New Zealand’s international cultural legacy in America is about 70 per cent Tolkien references and 30 per cent Flight of the Conchords. In the DNA of Flight of the Conchords is the outline of our national character: our passiveness, our low-key approach to everything, our unwillingness to make a big deal of anything, our little brother relationship to Australia, the colloquial, small-time politicians and the provincialism we can’t quite escape.”