The first episode of six in the new season of The Brokenwood Mysteries features, among many things, a man playing Captain James Cook without pants. No, the local whodunnit has not gone back in time. But the town’s amateur theatre company has.
The mystery involves a musical about the town’s history and the show’s writer who is convinced he’s written the next Hamilton.
That Cook – played by Dr Plummer, played by Cameron Rhodes – is flying at half-mast wasn’t meant to be in the musical. The wardrobe malfunction is just something Brokenwood producer-writer Tim Balme remembers happened in his own am-dram days.
And if it makes a brief point about our mixed views on Cook – and in a show that is our biggest television export – all the better, says Balme. The episode’s director is Katie Wolfe, Balme’s wife, also a writer, whose thorny play about race relations, The Haka Party Incident, debuted in 2021 and has been playing at arts festivals and touring ever since.
But it wasn’t Wolfe’s gift for social commentary that made Balme suggest she direct. It was their shared background on stages such as the one at the local Brokenwood theatre.
“I said to her, ‘I’m going to do a musical episode; you should direct it,’ because both of us started our acting careers in amateur theatre in the provinces. She’s from New Plymouth and I’m from Tauranga. So we’ve all lived that.
“There are lots of references in it to things that actually happened in our past … like Dr Plummer losing his trousers. I was in a play when that happened. Katie was the perfect person to direct that. She understood it.”
Brokenwood – Musical, clearly isn’t the next Hamilton. But other than the dodgy story and lyrics with American references, it sounds quite good, thanks to a cast who can hold a tune and the show’s resident soundtrack composer Joel Haines. “When I said to him, ‘Look, I’m going to do a musical’, his eyes lit up.”
The character playing the deluded musical writer explains the incongruities as: “We have to think of our international audience.” It’s a line that Balme agrees is a little self-aware.
The episode is the first in the show’s ninth season and third on TVNZ. It’s been on cosy-crime streamer Acorn TV in the US since April and debuts in the UK at the end of this month. The rest of the world is madly dubbing all six episodes while the show’s maker, South Pacific Pictures, is already filming season 10.
But the Cook gag and a smattering of te reo Māori between Detective Daniel Chalmers (Jarod Rawiri) and new recurring character Missy Tohoroa (Roimata Fox) and her son might suggest Brokenwood, despite its international footprint, is getting even more local as it matures.
“I’ve always subscribed to the belief that the only reason Brokenwood has been a success offshore is because it has to ring true here first. When I’m making up these episodes, I remind myself it has to please our local audience first and if they’re not buying it then I’ve transgressed,” says Balme.
He says he recalls being told by producers at the beginning of Brokenwood and other shows he has written to avoid te reo because it might put off international audiences.
“Now I can write lines of te reo and we don’t subtitle it – if the audiences are loving the show, they’ll go and find out what it means or the context will carry them through.
“So in regard to ‘we’ve got to think about our international audience’, it’s a kind of a push back on that a little bit.
“They’ll cope.”
The Brokenwood Mysteries, TVNZ 1, Sunday, July 23, 8.30pm; TVNZ+
