
Noob beginnings
Noob creators Victoria Boult and Rachel Fawcett tell DQ about this coming-of-age comedy’s journey from TikTok to television and explain why social media can become the home for emerging creative talent on and off the (phone) screen.
While traditional television channels continue to lose ground to social media platforms, a new comedy series that originated on TikTok is now set to launch on TV in New Zealand.
Created by Victoria Boult and Rachel Fawcett, Noob (styled n00b) debuted on the video-sharing site in August 2022 after receiving backing from the Every Voice programme, which is designed to support emerging voices with funding from NZ On Air, Screen Australia and TikTok itself.
The show quickly racked up 1.5 million views, leading Warner Bros Discovery-backed broadcaster Three and its streamer ThreeNow to commission a full six-part, half-hour series that will debut in New Zealand on October 17.
“TikTok is a pretty amazing tool to reach youth audiences, but I still genuinely believe youth audiences like longform storytelling,” Boult tells DQ. “They’re not going to turn on broadcast television and watch your 20.30 show. They will absolutely go on a streaming service and binge the series. So for us knowing that it’s going to be on one of our streaming services here, knowing that teen audiences are going to be able to binge the whole thing, I have no doubt that very loyal TikTok audience is going to be pulled over.”

On TikTok, Noob comprises 12 episodes, each featuring a pair of teens in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the early 2000s as they deal with sex, relationships and the internet.
The TV series, set in 2005, continues that theme, but puts one character from the TikTok videos at its centre. When King of High School and all-around-party animal Nikau is outed, he goes from cool guy to social outcast. Forced to find a new group of friends, each of whom has been ‘othered’ by small-town New Zealand and finds escape online, Nikau must traverse the complicated world of high school (and the internet) in the pursuit of love, friendship, independence and the confidence to be one’s true self.
Max Crean reprises his role as Nikau, starring alongside Jaxson Cook (’emo boy’ James), Shervonne Grierson (Nikau’s girlfriend Lauren), James Sexton (Nikau’s best friend Christian) and Felicia To’a (people pleaser Clara).
Directing the series alongside Josh Frizzell, Boult also led the writers room, with Fawcett producing. Great Southern Television is the production company behind the series, which is being distributed internationally by Oble.
Co-showrunners Boult and Fawcett originally met over Zoom when they took part in a networking event supported by New Zealand’s producer and writers guilds. They immediately bonded over a shared love of Greta Gerwig, horror films and comedy, and sought each other out after their initial two-minute meeting was over.
Discussing the Every Voice programme, they then raised the idea of creating a TikTok series together. Ironically, Boult had never used the app – “I’m supposed to be Gen-Z,” she jokes – but they talked about revisiting what it was like to live in the early 2000s soon after the birth of the internet and the emergence of social media platforms such as MySpace. “Having lived and suffered through that time period, I was passionate about making a coming-of-age series that interrogates that,” Boult says. “So we created this concept over coffee. And it was like lightning in a bottle. It was awesome.”

The TikTok series was produced on a NZ$50,000 (US$31,000) budget – but with a cast and crew nostalgic for the early 2000s, “people worked for nothing,” Fawcett says. “Honestly, it was the greatest week. We got everything we needed. We just made it work. We got people who believed in it and were happy to cut deals.”
Behind the camera, Boult designed a series that utilised the app’s vertical framing. “You have to paint your ceiling or do something interesting with the roof, which I never considered before,” she says. “Also, one of the things Rachel taught me was how, within the first five seconds, you’ve either got the audience or you haven’t. Having to structure these episodes around trying to grab the audience’s attention was a really interesting challenge from both a writing and a directing perspective.”
The series proved to be a hit among TikTok users, and Fawcett and Boult were even able to point to some of the comments beneath the videos that called for a full series to be made when pitching the series to broadcasters. “We were able to just take that to our network and be like, ‘Look at all these people demanding a TV show,’” Boult says.

That proof of concept helped to secure the Three commission, with further financial support from NZ On Air. “They saw an opportunity to reach youth viewers in New Zealand in a way that’s been really hard for networks here to do,” Fawcett notes. “Vic and I and our generation just understand how important social media is and how much viewership habits have changed for younger audiences. It’s not that they’re not interested in seeing Kiwi stories; you just have to deliver it in a way that speaks specifically to them – and that’s not always through linear television. Social media should be the tool you invest in and use to reach your audience.”
In fact, funding for a social media producer was built into the budget for Noob, and fans can expect to see more TikTok content rolled out in advance of the TV launch. “I feel like social media producers should always be part of a producer’s budget for anything. It should be just as important as a gaffer, frankly,” Fawcett continues. “We go to movies, we subscribe to all the services. We’ll watch longform content. It’s the way we discover it, and the way our audience discover [shows] in the first instance has changed. It’s not through linear advertising or billboards, it’s what’s on social media.”
Crean is one of several cast and crew – including director of photography Daryl Wong – to have made the jump from TikTok to TV with Noob. In Max’s short episode, he is revealed to have a crush on a player on the school rugby team, and after writing some fan fiction pairing them together, he discovers his feelings are reciprocated.
At just three minutes long, “it was a very fast turnaround for a story, and it was beautiful to see it now jumping to a TV series,” Crean says. “We gave it to them [viewers] in three minutes. Now we’ve got to make them really feel the highs and lows of the story, which has been done beautifully. From a day’s worth of work to a month has blown it up in proportion.”
Shifting to three hours of television has provided more time to “witness the struggle of understanding yourself and the complexities,” Crean says. “It’s about someone trying to understand that they’re going to be all over the place for a little bit, and where they need to land and where they need to find themselves in their community, and even whether that community is the community for them.”

It was the fan reaction to “dream leading man” Crean’s TikTok episode that led Boult and Fawcett to use put Max at the centre of the TV series. “He really is the heart and soul of this series,” Fawcett says. “There isn’t anything scarier than what Nikau goes through, and there were a few times on set watching Max that I actually cried and had to walk off. To realise you’re gay in a small town in 2005 and just knowing how scary and lonely that is for his character, it’s really sad, and Max played it really beautifully. He got the heaviest stuff for sure.”
The whole show is loosely inspired by real experiences lived by Boult and Fawcett, and of their lives growing up in New Zealand and using the internet as a place of both escape and empowerment, where they could “reach other worlds from an isolated place,” Boult says.
That idea permeated the writers room, where one rule was that everything that happens in the show had to be based on something that happened to them, a friend or a friend of a friend.
“There’s truth in all of these characters,” Boult says. “Max did such a beautiful job of bringing that character’s journey to life. But each of our five leads explore that avenue by which isolated, lonely teenagers can find escape and empowerment in other worlds on the internet. The internet is not an awful place. Sometimes it can be, but largely it’s a place of connection and growth.”
In the five-day writers room, Boult started with the TikTok series and honed in on Max. “Then everything else is gone,” the writer and director explains. “We took the guttural feelings and ideas and teenage instincts of the TikTok series, but then everything else was out the window.”

“As a result of us embracing the ridiculousness of being teenagers, we came up with some really silly, beautiful, surreal, weird stuff that I’ve never seen in a TV series before. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, we’ll have to wait to see what audiences think. But we’ve created something that’s really distinct and I’m really proud of it.”
On set, Crean bounced between fun scenes and other deeply emotional moments, though the atmosphere was always focused, fun and supportive. “The environment we were working in was so warm that it let us feel comfortable going with our instincts. I found that beautiful and it caused beautiful friendships,” he says. “Kudos to Rachel and Vic. Their effort and their love for this project shines through from start to finish. I hope it shines through for other people to see.”
“As a producer, every day I was waiting for some shit to go down and then it didn’t happen,” Fawcett says. “We got lucky. We got an amazing cast and crew and everyone was so on board this project from the beginning.
“Vic and I being young female showrunners is quite rare in New Zealand, but everyone just got behind the scripts that Victoria wrote. Everyone was just so excited. Even the older people on set wanted this to be a good experience for us. They’re like, ‘We don’t want to scare them away. Let’s like make this really a fun place for us to learn and grow.’ Everyone loved the story so much, they just helped make it magical.”
For Boult, co-directing with Frizzell (The Brokenwood Mysteries) also gave her the support of an experienced director as they split the six-part series evenly. Boult took episodes three, four and five.

“We had the best dynamic on set because his masterful talent is in the technical world. He’s amazing at tech, he’s got great taste, he’s got great story instincts,” she says. “He was kind of my mentor. I walked on having directed nothing more than a TikTok series, and I’ve walked out of this having directed three episodes of primetime television. A large chunk of that was due to Josh’s incredible mentorship.”
The creatives have already mapped out two more seasons of Noob should TV viewers support the show as much as its audience on TikTok, while Boult believes the “raucous, boundary-pushing, deeply heartfelt” series sums up what it means to be a teenager, with “chaos, vulnerability, hilarious moments, sad moments and desperate screaming.”
“It’s all of the beauty of teenagerhood wrapped up into one very fun little package,” she says. “If you like anything in the realm of Sex Education, Derry Girls or The Inbetweeners, anything that’s fun but has so much heart, you will like Noob.”
“I hope people look at our characters with a lot of empathy and give them a lot of grace in a way that I think a lot of people don’t give each other these days,” says Fawcett. “Our characters are all very flawed people, just like everyone is, and I hope people see their growth and then try and translate that to people around them in their own life. Let’s allow people to be better and not be so quick to dump on them or cancel them, especially when they show effort to be better humans. I hope people take that from the show.”
Noob also stands as an example of how TikTok and other social media platforms can be used as incubators for new creative talent, as well as a way to discover what young audiences are watching that perhaps isn’t on mainstream television.
“If you want to study audiences and audience behaviour, there is no better place right now,” Fawcett says. “For storytellers, writers and directors like Victoria and actors like Max, there’s just a wealth of talent to be discovered there, so many stories to tell and so many niche audiences to reach.
“This is where filmmakers in the industry should be looking at to unearth these stories. If you get a chance to make a TikTok series, make it. You never know what’s gonna happen. You can end up with a frickin’ TV show.”
tagged in: Great Southern Television, Max Crean, Noob, Oble, Rachel Fawcett, Three, ThreeNow, TikTok, Victoria Boult