Crime might not pay, but you'd have to say there's a bit of the old New Zealand On Air lolly in it.
Even for an amateur detective like me, it's easy to find the evidence: dramas from Outrageous Fortune to The Blue Rose to Harry to documentary series like Beyond the Darklands and New Zealand Detectives, which started again this week, have all been made with NZ On Air moolah. So I'd say that it is beyond reasonable doubt that crime pays. At least it does for local TV makers who know how to fill out funding application forms.
The dramas that NZ on Air funds I get the point of - there's nothing so enjoyable as a well-made crime drama - but I really don't understand the reason for documentary series like Darklands and New Zealand Detectives (Tuesdays. 9.35pm, TV One), which simply rehash old, real-life crimes.
Mind you, as someone who assiduously avoids reading real-life crime and court stories, and typically fast-forwards through them on the TV news, I am hardly the target market for something like this second series of New Zealand Detectives.
I avoid reading or watching stuff about real crime because most real crime is of the pathetic, nasty, small-time and rather boring variety that reveals nothing more than that the world continues to contain people who are venal, stupid, low and mean. Still, at the beginning of this week's episode of Detectives, narrator Robyn Malcolm promised I was about to hear "the untold stories behind New Zealand's worst cases and the hunt for those who done it".