My Life Is Murder: "It Takes Two" (Greenstone Pictures, Acorn Pictures, DCD Rights, TVNZ1, Network 10, American Public Television; TV series episode, aired October 10, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I caught up with My Life Is Murder, a genuinely charming if a bit offbeat TV detective series from New Zealand featuring Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, a retired female police detective turned unofficial private investigator who helps the official police solve crimes. The series started in 2019 and the first season actually took place in Australia, with Lawless’s character, Alexa Crowe, paired up with detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). Then the show moved to New Zealand and Crowe’s partner/nemesis on the official police force became Harry Henare (Rawiri Jobe). The show that ran on KPBS was the third-season opener, “It Takes Two,” centered around a tango dancing school run by César Borges (Adam-Jon Fiorentino), a highly charismatic and sexy instructor with a penchant for seducing all the young, nubile female students. The school is actually owned by Eva Borges (Jennifer Ward-Leland), César’s mother, and among the students that have floated in and out of César’s bed is Hilary Morel (Kimberley Crossman). When another student with whom César had been having an affair with, Beatriz Delgado (Mikaela Rüegg), is found stabbed to death, Hilary is a prime suspect and so is Gavin Hartley (Dan Musgrove), an actor in a popular role-playing video game. Hilary claims to have been home alone the night of Beatrice’s murder, but Alexa deduces that while she was home, all right, she was having an affair with a married man, Reg (Mike Minogue) and the two spent the night together having sex largely, on her part at least, as a rebound relationship after César dumped her for Beatriz.

Alexa and Harry enroll in the tango class and pose as an engaged but not yet married couple, though that doesn’t stop César from putting the moves on Alexa (“I like older women,” he explains), which Alexa goes along with to get more information. Beatriz and her brother Francisco Delgado (Daniel Fernandez) turn out to be human-rights attorneys as well as tango students, and ultimately, after noticing an unusually scented oil on the knife used to stab Beatriz to death and then seeing César use that same sort of oil on a pair of steaks he was going to grill for Alexa, she deduces that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Eva Borges, who was not César’s biological mother at all. Instead she was a midwife at a prison run by the Argentinian military junta who ruled the country during the so-called “Dirty War” period from 1976 to 1983, and César was the son of one of the women prisoners in the establishment where Eva worked. When the junta fell she kidnapped César and high-tailed it to New Zealand, passing César off as her biological son. Ultimately Eva is arrested for the crime she committed on New Zealand soil and César is free to continue cutting his swath with all the hot young women in his tango class. I’d watched some of the previous episodes of My Life Is Murder from the first (2019) season that took place in Australia (and benefited from Bernard Curry being quite a bit more charismatic than Rawiri Jobe!), which I pretty much wrote off as “engaging if not ultimately very satisfying,” a description I’d give to this episode, too. I liked the character of Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), a Native (Aborigine or Maori? It’s hard to tell since she was a running character in both the Australian and New Zealander phases of the show) assistant to Alexa who according to the show’s background page on Wikipedia was busted for computer hacking and paroled to Alexa in exchange for using her expertise to fight computer crime instead of committing it. Madison even has a pet cat, Chowder, who’s played by a feline named “Zeppelin” who actually gets a credit on the show.