The man behind New Zealand’s most iconic TV doctor shares his secret love for the Bionic Woman, the existential power of Time Team and the worst thing about Love Island.

As Shortland Street returns to our screens in 2024, fans of the long-running soap should prepare to see Chris Warner as we’ve never seen him before. Actor and playwright Michael Galvin has played the genius surgeon and heaving heartthrob through a series of natural disasters, numerous wives and explosive singalongs, but as 2024 dawns on a Ferndale besieged by tragedy and trauma, things have really changed.

“Chris has had some very bad things happen to him, but this time, he gives up on his personal appearance and caring about the hospital,” Galvin tells The Spinoff. A hopeless Dr Love sounds miserable, but Galvin couldn’t be more thrilled. “Even after all these years, Chris has never been to a place where he just doesn’t care about things. It’ll be great to be this character who has nothing but disdain for everyone. I can’t wait.”

After three decades of playing the same character, Galvin says the role of Chris Warner never goes stale. He credits the show’s writing team for keeping the character fresh and the storylines challenging. “I have nothing but admiration for the writers who keep coming up with this stuff,” he says of the juicy drama that lies ahead. “There are always new people coming through, and they bring their own energy and quirks and so you’re always bouncing off of them.”

We asked Galvin to scrub up and dissect his own life in TV, including his passion for surreal telly, a love for digging up old stuff, and a fierce hatred for reality TV.

My earliest TV memory is… I had a big Catholic family, and we’d all watch Dave Allen. He was an Irish Catholic comedian, and he’d sit in his suit and tell stories and he’d smoke and drink. My dad absolutely loved him, because my dad smoked and drank. Very old school, but he’d sit in this chair and tell funny stories, and my dad would just laugh and laugh and we’d laugh along too.

The TV show I was obsessed with as a child was… The Prisoner. It was made before I was born and starred Patrick McGoohan, who plays a spy who quits and then gets abducted. They take him to this weird island where everybody wears beautiful blazers, but it’s never kind of fully explained what the island is. He tries to escape, and every time these enormous bouncing balloons come and smother him.

It was extremely surreal, very exciting and completely unpredictable. Everyone had a number, and he was Number Six. Number Two was the boss of the island, and Number Two’s job was to interrogate Number Six for information, but it was never made explicit what the information was. You never knew who Number One was, and when the final episode aired in the late 1960s in England, it stopped the UK because everyone wanted to know who Number One was. Number One was him! It was this enormous extended metaphor about being your own worst enemy.

My earliest TV crush was… The Bionic Woman. I was really in love with her, but it was a secret love. It wasn’t like a Farrah Fawcett love when you could buy her that iconic poster and put it up on your wall. It was more like a secret crush that I couldn’t tell anyone about, because she was the Bionic Woman. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell anyone. Maybe because I was Catholic.

The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… Togs, Togs, Undies. It’s this wonderful comic idea, perfectly executed. I just loved it. It was so funny.

The TV moment that haunts me to this day is… The classic “Please Tell Me That is Not Your Penis” line. That will be on my gravestone.

My favourite TV moment of all time is… The final moment of the first series of Severance. There’s this absolute jaw dropping moment where one of the characters discovers who they are in the outside world. I highly recommend Severance, it’s one of my favourite shows. So clever and funny and brilliant.

My TV guilty pleasure is… Time Team. I absolutely love this show. I can understand why most people would find it vaguely boring and sad that I would like it, but I love the history and the way there’s a detective element to it. Something suddenly turns up, and at first they think it means this, but then oh no, it means something else, as they piece together the story of whatever place they’re in. There’s something incredibly reassuring about life going on, about how life was around hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We’re just a small part of it. It’s escaping your own era, in a way, and seeing yourself from a historical perspective.

The one thing I wish people knew about working on Shortland Street is… It’s a lot of hard work remembering all that dialogue, and it’s a lot of hard work for the crew who are there 11 hours a day, because we’re shooting so much of it. Other TV shows only shoot six or seven minutes a day, but we’re shooting 22.

The TV show I wish I’d been involved with is… I was obsessed with Arrested Development. Just so clever and hilarious, I just loved it. I thought, wouldn’t be fun to be in something like that and help write it. Excellent.

The most stylish person on TV is… Personally I have terrible style, but from my perspective, I’d figure someone like Don Draper. He always looks cool. That’s what I’d like to look like, but I don’t. I look like me.

My most watched TV show of all time is… The Simpsons. So genius and nothing like it. In the 90s, I would religiously watch every episode just because it was so far ahead of everyone else in terms of comedy.

My controversial TV opinion is… Every time the TV awards roll around, I don’t think Shortland Street is nominated for enough things. I think the acting on our show is terrific, and we’re very seldom nominated. I don’t mean me, I mean everyone else. This year we got an award for best writing, which I think is completely appropriate. I don’t know how controversial it is, but yes, Shortland Street should be better represented in TV award nominations.

The TV show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to, is… Love Island. I can’t bear it. I don’t get that whole thing of people performing their lives and then getting really self righteous and indignant about the situation that they have chosen to be in, and suddenly they’re just railing at the universe about this terrible thing that has happened. You decided for that to happen, you chose this environment! If you’d just lived your real life, it wouldn’t be happening. Same thing with Married at First Sight. It infuriates me.

The last thing I watched on TV was… I’m rewatching Game of Thrones. The good thing about watching it this time round is starting to understand it. Watching it the first time, I’m like “I have no idea what he’s talking about”. Watching the second time, I’m like, “wait a minute, I know who they mean”. I’m really enjoying it.

Shortland Street returns on Monday 5 February at 7pm on TVNZ2 and streams on TVNZ+.