This is essentially "Midsomer Murders" set in New Zealand ... but the writing and setting are working better for me this time around. Four episodes of 90 minutes each.

Neill Rea plays Mike Shepherd, sent from Auckland to the small (and fictional) town of Brokenwood to help with a murder investigation. Once there, he finds that the town, and the local police officer, are haunted by another older investigation that was never closed. Spoiler alert: our hero solves both. And decides to stay in Brokenwood, even though it requires he take a demotion. He's assisted in his investigations by his second-in-command at the Brokenwood Police, Kristen Sims (Fern Sutherland). The third-most-seen police officer is Sam Breen (Nic Sampson), who Shepherd and Sims assign most of the scut-work (visiting the weirdest suspects, looking for evidence in garbage heaps). Their eccentric Russian medical examiner Gina Kadinsky (Cristina Ionda) is very good at her job, but also strange - and her added commentary is usually worth a laugh when she's on screen. The final series regular is Shepherd's new neighbour, Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor) who's a suspect in the first episode (and again in the second series) as he skates on the edge of legality. But he's also a charming fount of information about locals and wine, and whatever the episode needs him to be (he's a bit of a walking plot device).

The characters are good and the mysteries are interesting without being insanely complex. There are red herrings, but they generally end up making some sense within the plot (as opposed to the type that leave you thinking "what the hell does that have to do with anything?!"). I binged the season and enjoyed it.

An interesting postscript to this is the number of people it shares with "The Almighty Johnsons." In poking around around the DVD extras, I realized I recognized the main series writer, Tim Balme. Not as a writer, but as an actor: he was series regular Mike Johnson in the Johnsons. Similarly, Fern Sutherland was Dawn in the full run of the Johnsons. Then in the fourth episode in this series, Jared Turner shows up as a suspect - he was Ty Johnson in the Johnsons, and Dawn's love interest. I started the second season, and found "Olaf Johnson" (actor Ben Barrington) in the first episode. Is this because Tim Balme is picking friends from a show he'd previously worked on, or because the New Zealand TV scene is small enough that these are the people the show has to choose from? I suspect the latter, although one would hope the cast of Johnsons got along. But I also realized that if a Canadian show was filming in Toronto, you would definitely notice overlap with previous Toronto-based shows ...