It was during Philly de Lacey’s first summer in Queenstown that she started telling people, “We have to write a show about this place.”
The CEO of production house Screentime NZ moved from Auckland to the southern hub two years ago and found it “such an unusual place, such a wonderful place. A little village right smack in the centre of outstanding scenery, with the big, rugged mountains. It’s got a very adventurous spirit. And the variety: the wealth, the tourists, the people on working holidays, the old-school farming families. It’s a microcosm. So, ‘cosy crime’ in spades, basically.”
But the show that emerged, A Remarkable Place to Die, isn’t strictly cosy crime, at least not in the same way as the most obvious local comparison, The Brokenwood Mysteries. Although it shares the same format – 90-minute episodes, a murder mystery in each – the bucolic air of Brokenwood gives way to designer houses and the tourist crowd in this show. And clearly, Queenstown is a real place.
“It’s not like Brokenwood at all. But New Zealand drama has often tended to stray quite dark, and certainly the dramas that I’ve produced in the past, we’ve always gone quite dark. I really wanted to kind of try something a bit new: the phrase we used a lot through the production was ‘chocolate box’. We wanted it to look beautiful and to have a sense of fun and not take itself too seriously, and to kind of invite you in. But then you have all these murders and mysteries and puzzles to solve, along with the detectives. All our characters are slightly heightened, and when you watch it, I think you see that everybody’s having a good time, even the baddies.”
De Lacey turned to long-time collaborator John Banas to co-write the four-episode first season and – crucially for this kind of show – shape the characters. They came up with a protagonist: Detective Inspector Anais Mallory (an impressive Chelsie Preston Crayford), who is returning to her home town – and a good deal of unfinished business – after four or five years as a Sydney cop. She dives straight into a plot involving Skipper’s Canyon, South American backpackers, a fancy restaurant and a wealthy antique dealer. That all hooks into a story arc, on the serious side for the genre, around the traumatic death of DI Mallory’s sister and the subsequently complicated relationship with her mother (Rebecca Gibney), which will presumably find a resolution over the course of the season.
“Chelsie took real ownership of Anais,” says de Lacey. “She’s a phenomenal talent. She challenged every script, she challenged every scene, she wanted to really think through what it meant for Anais.”
The show was developed from the beginning with international sales in mind. Germany’s Real Film Berlin, which previously helped finance Screentime’s The Gulf, is the principal partner, with TVNZ, German public broadcaster ZDF and the streamer Acorn. A second season was being sketched out even as de Lacey flew to the annual Mipcom television industry trade show in Cannes in early October for meetings about the first.
De Lacey says locals were enthusiastic during this year’s shoots. “We would just sort of ring people and go, ‘We want to do this on your property, do you mind?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, no problem.’” Those locals included Great Southern Television founder Philip Smith, a long-time Queenstown resident who is now her “almost neighbour”. Was Smith, who created the Central Otago drama One Lane Bridge, miffed about someone else doing a production on his turf?
De Lacey laughs. “I adore Phil. He and I get on really well. I showed him a few scenes of an early cut of it while we were still filming, and he was terrific.”
A Remarkable Place to Die: TVNZ 1, from Sunday, November 3, 8.30pm.
