Set in the fictional small North Island town of Brokenwood, this quirky New Zealand whodunit follows Detective Inspector Mike Shepherd, a country-music-loving veteran detective with a colourful romantic history, who investigates an implausibly high murder rate amongst Brokenwood’s eccentric residents. Paired with his straight-laced, by-the-book junior partner DC Kristin Sims, Shepherd solves each case through instinct, local knowledge, and a healthy disregard for procedure — assisted by their sharp-witted, quietly macabre pathologist Gina Kadinsky.
The Brokenwood Mysteries is a New Zealand crime whodunit comedy-drama conceived by Tim Balme, who also serves as head writer, showrunner, and producer. Produced by South Pacific Pictures, the series premiered on New Zealand’s Prime channel (now Sky Open) on 28 September 2014, later moving to Acorn TV internationally from 2021 onwards. Now well past its tenth anniversary, the series has run for twelve series and 60 episodes, with each of the first six series comprising four feature-length episodes before expanding to six from Series 7 onwards.
Neill Rea stars as Detective Inspector Mike Shepherd, a scruffy, unkempt, but quietly magnetic detective who arrives in Brokenwood driving a 1971 Holden Kingswood loaded with an extensive country music tape collection and, depending how you count them, an indeterminate number of ex-wives. Shepherd’s rumpled charm and disregard for convention make him an unlikely romantic magnet — some of whom turn out to be suspects themselves — whilst his genuine investigative instincts consistently cut through Brokenwood’s tangled web of small-town secrets, grudges, and rivalries. He’s partnered with DC Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), a more conventional, by-the-book officer whose steadier temperament provides a natural foil to Shepherd’s freewheeling style, alongside pathologist Dr Gina Kadinsky (Cristina Serban Ionda), whose sharp wit and calm handling of the town’s ever-mounting body count adds to the show’s droll comic tone.
Each episode presents a self-contained, inventively plotted murder amongst Brokenwood’s endearingly eccentric community — cycling enthusiasts, ukulele orchestras, séance attendees, dinosaur fossil hunters, and UFO convention-goers have all, at various points, provided both suspects and victims. The show’s tone leans deliberately into gentle absurdity and dark comedy without losing its essential warmth, drawing favourable comparisons to British “cosy crime” staples whilst carrying a distinctly Kiwi sensibility — the local coffee cart, the country music soundtrack, and the tea-drinking habits of Brokenwood’s police force all mark it out as a specifically New Zealand creation rather than merely a transplanted British formula.
Filming takes place almost entirely around Warkworth, a small town in the greater Auckland region of New Zealand’s North Island, whose farms, vineyards, beaches, and village streets provide the show’s consistently gorgeous, varied backdrops. The series has built a genuinely devoted international fanbase, particularly through Acorn TV’s US distribution, with reviewers praising the strength of its central pairing and the sheer inventiveness of its murder methods, even as some note the supporting cast’s talent thins out further down the credits.
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