Paul Casserly: The comfort of murder

Photo of Neill Rea and Fern Sutherland in the Brokenwood Mysteries, supplied by South Pacific Pictures

After writing off the series as pedestrian and dull, Paul Casserly has realised homegrown murder series The Brokenwood Mysteries is a charming delight.

After a diet of big budget thrills from the likes of HBO and Cinemax, the pace of Prime's The Brokenwood Mysteries nearly had me giving in to my ever-decreasing attention span.

The locally made show sat on my PVR while I chomped through the glossy cartoon violence of Gotham and American Horror Story.

It looked pedestrian, at first glance; a programme for old people. And I was right. But as I gorged on the show this past weekend, I realised that's all part of the charm. And this is a seriously charming series.

Brokenwood may lack the sophistication of a BBC thriller or a Scandinavian crime spree but it's not trying to be one those, rather it's mining the seam successfully dealt to by the likes of Midsomer Murders, Bergerac, and even that UKTV staple Heartbeat.

The rules for all crime shows are incredibly durable and the makers of Brokenwood have turned the cliché knob up to 11. We have the rough diamond male cop with (slightly) unorthodox methods and a young pretty female colleague as sidekick.

There is, of course, an iconic car, in this case a 1970s Holden HQ. After all, Colombo had his shitty little Peugeot, Inspector Morse his Jag, and, closer to home, Jay Laga'aia had a hotted up Ford van in Street Legal.

Few sleuths catch the bus, although Hercule Poirot loved nothing better than a train.

We're yet to have a hero detective racing along silently in an electric Nissan Leaf, or as far as I know, even a hybrid. Still, I have one bone to pick in this department; a Holden is an Australian vehicle.

They could have pushed the boat out and given our hero an actual NZ car. There are but a few options, but a Trekka would have worked nicely, despite the reliability issues, poor handling and a proneness to rust.

Or what about a classic Leyland P76, a car famed for the ability of it's boot to be able to hold a 44 gallon drum.

Even that would have seemed slightly less Australian. But like it or not, Holden is our default nostalgic kiwi car, in the same way we think that Weetbix has some intrinsic kiwi quality, and how we desperately cling to Marmite.

The other rule of the wacky/iconic car is that it must be used in some sort of chase. In Brokenwood, we were rewarded as the Holden hooned down the runway chasing a small plane in a suitably comic action scene that brought the first instalment to an end.

But the quaint small town is perhaps the most important element. Gritty realism is the enemy when you're trying to veg out in a warm murder mystery haze while downing the last of the casserole as you squeeze some final drops from the cask. A Luxury Flake would complete the picture.

Wouldn't it be nice to live on a lifestyle block? Grow some grapes? Have an affair? Murder the annoying neighbour? Comfort viewing is what The Brokenwood Mysteries aspire to and it's an aspiration that the series has nailed so firmly it feels like it could run for years.

Murder was on my mind all weekend actually. While Brokenwood pretty much uses corpses as props, a new podcast venture, Serial, goes deeper, and gets forensic in every sense of the word.

Serial is from the team behind the most famous of all podcasts, This American Life, and it's an addictive delight.

While This American Life takes a theme and presents 3 or 4 stories loosely connected to it, Serial takes one story and presents it in detail over a period of many weeks. The first series of Serial is a real life murder mystery.

In 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She'd been strangled. Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

A family friend of the accused, who had doubts about the conviction, contacted long time This American Life reporter Sarah Koenig last year, and she has been investigating ever since.

The series takes us along with Koneig as she tries to unravel the mystery. New episodes are released each Friday and in just 4 instalments I'm utterly enthralled and addicted.

You can subscribe to Serial for free via iTunes or listen to it here.