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The Brokenwood Mysteries: Series 10
R0 - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (25th December 2024). |
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The Film
 Touted as New Zealand's answer to Midsomer Murders, The Brokenwood Mysteries trades village fetes for cheese rolls as four-times divorced, country & western music-loving city officer Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Shepherd (The Irrefutable Truth About Demons's Neill Rea) first turned up in the North Island town of Brokenwood to put the "field in field investigator" and takes over investigation into a death that everyone else would rather believe was a suicide or accidental death, replacing the local senior inspector implicated in the case. Ditching the city for Brokenwood and a vineyard, Shephard finds his outsider status both alienates him from the locals but also allows him to view cases from a perspective lacking in partner Kristin Sims (The Almighty Johnsons' Fern Sutherland) and D.C. Daniel Chalmers (Fantail's Jarod Rawiri). And yet, they are as much sources of background information including ex-con barkeep Trudy Neilson (Tracy Lee Gray) who does not snitch but drops enigmatic clues about her customers, her brother Ray (What We Do in the Shadows' Jason Hoyte) who jumps behind all of the destined-to-fail attempts to attract tourists to Brokenwood after the failure of his scam "Lord of the Rings" location visits operation, hapless coffee truck vendor Frankie 'Frodo' Oades (Karl Willetts), the village vicar Lucas Greene (The Ugly's Roy Ward) and his psychiatrist partner Roger Plummer (Housebound's Cameron Rhodes), and odd jobsman Todd Taylor (Kauri Williams) who ends up on top of or under discovered dead bodies as often as Frodo, while the outlandish theories posited by humorless Russian pathologist Gina (Filthy Rich's Cristina Serban Ionda) are sometimes as fruitful as Shephard's habit of interrogating corpses. Series ten starts afresh after messily writing itself out of the awkward corner that was Mike in a potentially stable relationship via a meeting with one of his nuttier multiple ex-wives, so this one is sort of a reset to the status quo with more awkward flirtation from Gina who also annoys Kristen as her house guest, although she does have a point about Kristen mistaking a rock hammer for an ice pick in terms of which is the more effective murder weapon when the former winds up sticking out of a visiting paleontologist (Joseph Wycoff) in the series opener "Brokenwood-o-saurus" (93:09) in which the town pins its future on amateur Maggie Sturridge's (Bread & Roses's Joanna Briant) unearthing of a fossil that may be millions of years old only for it to disappear with suspects including her Creationist daughter Rowena (Tess Sullivan), Rowena's ex-con fiance (The Tank's Jack Barry), and a pair of middle-aged romantic rivals for Maggie's hand. In "Day of the Dead" (92:36), someone replaces a hanging festival pinata at the Brokenwood Small Business Association's annual themed night market with the corpse of one of its least-liked members (Aaron Ward). The most likely suspect seems like the vegemite taco truck seller (Esaú Mora) who objects to the appropriation of his culture, but more complex motives reveal themselves including his wife (800 Words' Anna Jullienne) reuniting with a recently-returned old flame (Westside's David de Lautour) whose fiancee (Shortland Street's Roxie Mohebbi) has a temper but an seemingly ironclad alibi for herself and her partner.  In "Publish or Be Damned" (92:48), an esteemed local author (Winter of Our Dreams' Cathy Downes) is found floating in a sacred Maori lake during an aspiring writers' weekend seminar she is hosting. Suspects include her long-suffering companion and uncredited ghostwriter (Hunt for the Wilderpeople's Rima Te Wiata), an aging playboy athlete (Home Kills' Cameron Jones) and a vapid influencer (Auckward Love's Holly Shervey) whose depictions of their careers fly in the face of the victim's (hypocritical) stance on authenticity of experience, and a couple past murder suspects whose buttons the victim liked pressing in pursuit of the truth. In "Love You to Death" (93:21), a Sylvia Plath-like suicide of a housewife (The Frighteners' Angela Bloomfield) must be anything but with plenty of female patients swooping in to comfort her dentist husband (Gareth Reeves) including multiple case suspect Jools Fahey (Ingrid Park) who Plummer diagnoses with a mental disorder in which she believes the victilm's husband is in love with her and stalked him relentlessly to the humiliation of her former trust fund baby husband Charles Wadsworth (Sam Bunkall). It can't be that straightforward, can it?  Brokenwood's Halloween "House of Screams" (91:03) hosts the real-life murder by sickle of handsome and popular but hated jock Chad (Ben Porter). The likely suspect seems to be the kid (Evil Dead Rise's Billy Reynolds-McCarthy) he got expelled by framing him for drug dealing who also just happened ue the sickle as part of his costume but Chad's girlfriend (Mirabai Pease), his best friend (Cameron Carter-Chan), and even the girl (Brigit Kelly) who put a death curse on him are hiding something about a classmate who accidentally drowned the year before. The victim's wealthy crypto-scamming father (Black Sheep's https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0150193/) was used to getting him out of jams but Mike discovers that his son was extorting him… then there's the new girl (Anais Shand) who may have had a fatal attraction to the victim. This genre-related episode was penned by former cast regular Nic Sampson (Power Rangers Mystic Force) and the second directed by actor De Lautour. In the season closer "Three Gold Leaves of Jesus" (92:06), the victim is apparently Jesus Christ himself and the weapon actually is a Roman spear… well, actually psychiatrist Roger Plummer reveals that the victim was Rick Faldo (The Devil's Rock's Nick Dunbar) who suffered from the zealous delusion that he was Christ himself and, since his girlfriend (Maria Walker) revealed she threw him out after taking him into be treated for crucifying himself with a nail gun, he might very well have inflicted the fatal wound with the spear he made himself… that is, if his unconventional performance of the nativity play at St. Judas with a theater company made up of Frodo's relatives including ex-con Johnny Oades (Crushed's Jamie Irvine) had not coincided with the swapping of a religious relic for a fake.  As a kind of reset after the last two seasons, The Brokenwood Mysteries' tenth series – an eleventh series has already wrapped – is largely successful in getting back into the "cozy" realm of the original seasons even if it requires suspending any personal growth for the characters. Neither Kristen nor Chalmers has a tumultuous love interest this series, Frodo provides comedy by hurting himself – although for a frightening moment it seems like he was being setup to be the main victim in one of the episodes – and Gina and Mike are the butt of jokes about her infatuation. The best cases are the ones that manage to surprise with the revelation of the killer or do a fake out where one person thinks they are guilty when someone else actually did the deed. The lesser ones are at least diverting on the way tot he solution even if the killer is obvious; as such, the tenth series is more promising a continuation than the recently-reviewed twenty-third series of Midsomer Murders. 
Video
Although the cover cites this as a two-disc set and it was not out of the ordinary for the British arm of Acorn to compress more video than advised onto fewer discs than their American counterpart releases, the six feature-length episodes are actually spread across three dual-layer discs with bonus features sharing the third disc (oddly, the PR images of the DVD cover are revised to say "3 DVD set" but this was apparently not done at the time of printing). While the entire series including the tenth is available on Blu-ray exclusively in the states, Acorn's 16:9 anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen PAL DVDs are more than sufficient for casual viewing even if one can imagine that the New Zealand rural settings must be that much more ravishing in HD with less compression than streaming. Night scenes hold up better here than on some of the Acorn DVDs of the cozy mysteries – which may have as much to do with the moody grading as the authoring of some of those series – and noise is kept to a minimum. 
Audio
The sole audio track is a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo mix that showcases the show's heavy use of original songs and covers by New Zealand musicians while the dialogue is always clear. Optional English HoH subtitles are included with some transcription and formatting errors (some Maori dialogue is also unsubtitled).
Extras
The sole extra is "The Making of Series 10" (16:36) which is actually an interview with creator/writer Timothy Balme – once the hapless hero of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive – who focuses on the overall series rather than the specific season. He reveals that it was initially developed as an Australian answer to Midsomer Murders but the development fell through and he dusted off the original script years later when another network was looking for a New Zealand equivalent of the British cozy whereupon he reworked it. He also reveals that the casting took a long time with Rea initially the show's casting director who reluctantly agreed to audition after being observed doing readings with other actors (Sutherland was also a late find). Balme did not expect the series to be internationally successful as most New Zealand shows are produced primarily for domestic audiences and do not export well. 
Overall
A sort of reset after writing itself in a few corners in the previous couple series, series ten of The Brokenwood Mysteries is for the most part back in the cozy realm.
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