Format

Endangered Species Aotearoa with WWF premiered 3rd July 2023 on TVNZ 1 on Monday 8.30pm, winning the time slot every week of the show’s run thereafter.

On an extremely competitive night, going up against adventure reality titans The Summit, Million Dollar Island and The Traitors, Endangered Species came out as the slot winner each week!

The show averaged a stellar 23.4% share in total viewers, well above the 13.1% of The Summit and 12.0% of The Traitors. The series reached 1.3 million New Zealanders, which is 27.5% of the total population. Endangered Species also performed extremely well digitally, ranking as the 9th highest reaching local show on the TVNZ+ VOD service in the last six weeks!

Endangered Species Aotearoa is a 6 x 60 factual entertainment series is based on the Rabbit original format The Most Endangered Species. It features conservationist Nicola Toki and comedian Pax Assadi travelling around New Zealand and the South Pacific to get up close and personal with an array of species at risk of extinction. Not your typical nature documentary series, Endangered Species Aotearoa aims to captivate a new audience of armchair wildlife enthusiasts through Assadi’s comedy and Nicola’s enthusiasm. Aotearoa is the contemporary Maori-language name for New Zealand.

The Most Endangered Species is an epic nature format, which sees a well-known comedian travel together with a scientist to the outermost corners of the world to get acquainted with the protection of endangered animals. The original Finnish format offers once in a lifetime experiences, such as racing a snow leopard in the Himalayas, looking for the Svalbard polar bears and visiting Borneo to explore the shrinking areas of the orangutan.