Michele Hewitson: Brokenwood a broken record

Fern Sutherland and Neill Rea are back for season two of The Brokenwood Mysteries.

If The Brokenwood Mysteries (Sundays, 8.30pm, Prime) at times feels more like a who's who of every living New Zealand actor than a whodunnit, that's no bad thing. It may be its best thing. Because in last week's episode, set inside - wink wink nudge nudge - Brokenwood's Theatrical

Society, there was Miranda Harcourt being an imperious old trout and Robyn Malcolm being an imperious old trout and various assorted other theatrical types playing luvvies. And look! Alas, criminally fleetingly (in the sort of the weak joke a Brokenwood writer would all too willingly give in to), there was one of the country's best actors, Elizabeth McRae, in a cameo as the small town's resident stickybeak - another in-joke; she is of course best known for playing Shortland Street's resident stickybeak, Marjorie Brasch.

Every actor playing an actor seemed to be having a jolly good time. It can't be too often that an actor gets the chance to enjoy over-acting, which is what the script calls for when you're playing a bunch of am-dram theatrical types. Of course there was a murder, but as the murdered one was a bit of a swine, one is not encouraged to waste much emotion bothering about the crime.

The dead bounder had dumped poor Juliet, who then came over all hysterical and Shakespearean and doomed and possibly mad. Well, she was playing Ophelia.

Such drama gave Detective Kristin Sims the chance to show off her knowledge of things theatrical. There was a bit too much of this sort of thing: A little to be or not to be-ing and to thine own self be true-ing goes a long way. But they do rather have to eke things out.

Those two-hour episodes are a bit of a stretch and they can feel like it. If the fact that almost every character who wanders across the screen is a suspect stretches credulity, so, at times does the script. There are some exchanges far madder than Ophelia, such as this one between Detective Sims and Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Shepherd.

Sims: "You never saw The Lord of the Rings?"

Shepherd: "I've got a thing about hairy feet."

Sims: "Is this where you tell me a story about one of your ex-wives? Sorry I didn't mean"

Shepherd: "I don't believe any of them had hairy feet."

Sims: "Well, good. I mean Not that it would matter."

Shepherd: "It would to me."

Sims: "Well, obviously."

Shepherd: "Do you want to change the subject?"

Sims: "Yes please."

Me: Yes! Please!

That really is amazingly dotty and somebody had a jolly good time writing it. They probably should have read it aloud and everyone should have had a good laugh, then somebody should have hit the delete button. And in a slicker production that is what would have happened. But Brokenwood determinedly, it seems, shuns slickness in favour of home-grown hokeyness.

It rambles, it makes terrible jokes, it relies on "characters" like the Smelly Nellie possum-trapping feral old lady who shuns cell-phones. They'll give you cancer "sure as a bull'll hump a heifer". It could, except for the cellphones, have been made in the 1970s. It could only have been made here. And that, after its revolving cast, is its second best thing because what it does have is considerable hokey charm.

Now all it needs is for the Topp Twins to turn up - as the Two Kens.