Brokenwood Mysteries: "Playing the Lie" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 14) at 10 I watched the third episode of the PBS-TV telecast of the New Zealand crime show from 2014, The Brokenwood Mysteries. Though this seems to have been an attempt by producers Down Under to create their own version of Midsomer Murders (the engaging British thriller series they formerly showed in the Thursday at 10 p.m. time slot), it’s a quite good series in its own right and in some ways better than its British model. This episode, “Playing the Lie,” has a double meaning because the action is centered around the Brokenwood Country Club golf course, which sits on land donated to it by the late Curtis Stone. He was already filthy rich when he married Alison Stone (Roz Turnbull), a woman 25 years his junior with a heftier-than-usual sexual appetite. Curtis and Alison had an “open” relationship in which they both had major amounts of extra-relational activity, though they had at least one child with each other, daughter Nicole (Greta Gregory), nicknamed “Nicky.” There’s a passing bit of dialogue suggesting that Curtis, at least, was Bisexual – the lead police detective, Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), is interrogating one of the club’s board members about whether he had an affair with Alison, and he says he’d rather have had an affair with Curtis. Alison meets her end at 6:30 a.m. when, on a morning walk through the golf course, she checks out a storage shed that’s been left unlocked – and a spooky-looking apparition bursts out carrying a large tank of insecticide. He’s dressed in a haz-mat suit and a full gas mask whose goggles are yellow, and he looks like a monster in a horror movie as he bursts out and attacks her by spraying her with the insecticide. We later learn that the insecticide is parathion, which really exists – though it’s so deadly to humans (I remember reading decades ago that just 32 drops is a lethal dose for people) most governments around the world have banned it. At least according to this program, New Zealand is no exception; the parathion ban went into effect in 2008, six years before this show was made and takes place.

Alison dies almost immediately and her body is discovered by a foursome who meet regularly at 8 a.m. for a round of golf. The police immediately suspect the club’s groundskeeper, Hamish Grimm (Elliot Wrightson, a drop-dead gorgeous young man who’s so hot that in a Lifetime movie you’d immediately expect him to be the villain), mainly because due to his job he’d be the most likely of the suspects to have access to parathion. There’s another red-herring suspect, a beekeeper who lost his bee farm when parathion and other pesticides drifted towards it from the golf course and killed all his bees. He’s now been diagnosed with terminal cancer and naturally had reason to be bitter about the golf-course management for having subjected it to those toxic chemicals in the first place. Nicky is in a relationship with a young man named Kyle Harrington (Nick Hoskins-Smith) who’s adopted an almost military bearing. The two become prime suspects because Shepherd figures that with mom out of the way, Nicky would inherit the Stone farm, marry Kyle and the two would be instant millionaires. They both claim to have spent the night together and say they were still in bed when Alison was killed, but Shepherd and his sidekicks, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland) and leg man Sam Breen (hot-looking redhead Nic Sampson), learn that they really weren’t. Kyle is the son of Roger Harrington (Ian Hughes), who manages the club and who was having an affair with Alison until she dumped him for boy-toy Hamish because she thought he was getting too possessive, while Hamish Grimm is the son of Janet Grimm (Donogh Rees), who used to run the Stones’ farm until she got fired for reasons that remain pretty obscure. So writer James Griffin has supplied us with a long list of suspects, each with motives for wanting Alison dead.

Ultimately Shepherd traces Alison’s murder to a meeting of the club’s five board members, including Alison and Roger, the night before she was killed. They were arguing over a deal Roger had worked out with a company called Fairway International to sell them half the golf course, which they would in turn sell to a large developer for a mixed-use project. To Roger’s utter surprise and disgust, Alison casts the deciding vote against the sale, and in reviewing the club’s bylaws Shepherd figures out why. It turns out that the original deed of gift from the Stone family to the Brokenwood Country Club specified that if the club ever went out of business, the land would revert to the Stones – and Alison didn’t want the deal to sell half the course to an outsider because without the income from the sale, the club would be forced into bankruptcy and as the surviving Stone heir she’d get all of it. So [spoiler alert!] Roger obtained an insect-spraying kit, a haz-mat suit and gas mask, and a supply of illegal parathion and killed Alison with them. There’s a marvelous confrontation between Shepherd and Roger in which Shepherd tries to get Roger to “do the honorable thing” and confess – and Roger calls the cop’s bluff and claims he has no admissible evidence to convict him. It also turns out that Roger’s son Kyle is the mysterious thief who’s been breaking into the club’s storerooms at night and stealing members’ golf clubs and trophies, though writer Griffin and director Michael Hurst portray Kyle’s burglaries pretty sympathetically and leave the implication that the courts will treat him leniently because he was just a mixed-up kid with big-time father issues. I’ve got to like Brokenwood Mysteries a lot despite the continued annoyances of the New Zealand rural accent (“detective” becomes “duh-TEEK-tive” and “sex” becomes “seex”), though at least Neill Rea blessedly pronounces the “t” in “often.”