Why David Lomas is still searching for Kiwi families' missing pieces: 'It's magic'

The first episode of this season sees father Dion Morrow reunited with his son Seb Siataga. Photo / Warner Brothers Discovery

Investigative journalist David Lomas hasn't lost his enthusiasm for finding Kiwi families' missing puzzle pieces.

The second season of David Lomas Investigates, which premiered on Three on Wednesday night, opens with Lomas meeting a mother searching for the father of her son.

The search takes Lomas all the way from Nelson to New York, where he reunites a father and son, and we see the pair embrace in an emotional hongi on camera.

Kiwi investigative journalist David Lomas has endless enthusiasm for what he does. Photo / Warner Brothers Discovery

Their story, while incredible, is nothing new for Lomas, who has been reuniting families like theirs for nearly 15 years. So after all this time, why can't Kiwis stop watching?

"They're everyday New Zealand stories," Lomas tells the Herald.

"The more I've done these programmes - and it's been a long time now doing them - I am just so staggered by how many people tell me they have someone in their family missing. Someone who's disappeared, some breakup in their family, or that they were adopted or their father left when they were a baby and they've never seen him."

Missing someone is "just such a common New Zealand story", he says.

"Just about every family has an amazing mystery within their family. The people who come on the programme open up and tell a story, which is remarkable. It's a very powerful story and a lot of them are very brave for the way they tell us what's happened to them. They open up and it's real."

The show never sugar coats messy reality. There are awkward moments, ugly crying and uncomfortable family secrets brought to light. Lomas doesn't necessarily help people find their happy ending - he helps them find their beginning.

For Lomas, it's impossible not to get emotionally invested in people's stories. Photo / Warner Brothers Discovery

And it's impossible not to tear up at the sight of a daughter reuniting with her long-lost father, or siblings meeting for the first time. It's impossible to hide the emotions flickering across their faces in the moment they recognise themselves in someone else.

Lomas' journeys have taken him from Aotearoa to New York to Romania to the Amazon rainforest. But those journeys aren't just physical, they're emotional. Do they take a toll on Lomas himself? "Yes, always," he admits.

"You can't do a story with a person who's going through that journey and not feel for them. The viewers get engaged, and we do when we're working on the programme. It's an amazing, emotional journey for the people who come on the programme, but of course it's an emotional journey for everyone who works on the story."

But he notes it's also "remarkably fulfilling".

"It's a very privileged thing to do, this opportunity to be not just a spectator but a participant to remarkable changes in people's lives," he says.

Lomas says his shows, from Missing Pieces to David Lomas Investigates, aren't like other reality TV shows, which are often scripted and "fabricated".

"This is real. There's few programmes where you go into a person's home and you find their family. You often go into people's homes and you see a different life. In this series I go to Romania, and it's a unique situation where you're dealing with everyday people meeting each other from two different worlds."

A lot of his earlier programmes, like Missing Pieces, had "relatively simple finds", he says.

Now, Lomas likes to look for a challenge.

"We look for journeys, adventures where not only are we going on a search, but also a visual journey - going to places which are interesting."

"We're looking for stories with twists and turns. We don't want someone saying, 'I'm looking for my dad and he lives in Hamilton', because that doesn't take the viewer on a journey and isn't necessarily interesting to watch or a challenge to solve."

The first step to the search is to do an in-depth interview of the applicant, he says.

"In the first episode, where a woman is looking for her son's father, she initially applied for her son, but I thought it was much more interesting to follow her dilemma of 'how do I fix this?' The story was about a mother's angst trying to sort things out for her son," Lomas explains.

Lomas says his process involves "intense" information gathering. Photo / Warner Brothers Discovery

"We do research in the sense of talking to all the family who might have answers and then we start trying to search. It's a real information gathering process to start with and then quite intense research to work out if we can do it, where would we have to go and what do we have to do?"

But finding the answers isn't always as easy as it looks on screen.

"We've got to have a deadline on things when we go to places and we're searching for someone. Often we take the person with us and everyone's on a deadline. You can't say, this is going to take two weeks so let's have a holiday on the beach," Lomas says.

"Sometimes we fail and we don't get there on time and we have to do something else. But if we commit to going somewhere, it's because we think we've got a very good chance of getting an answer. And we just cross our fingers and hope that we're right."

Once he gets the chance to "clear his head", a third season will be on its way to our screens, he says.

"I love it, so I've got no great plans to stop. I thought I was doing this for one year, now it's the fifteenth year of doing this. And I've lost no enthusiasm at all, it's still a magic thing to get up and do each day."

• David Lomas Investigates Season 2 is available to watch on ThreeNow