Characters connect in deft drama of the heart

Take it from Luc, the organic baker at the heart of the new Insiders Guide: love is a complicated human experience, an emotion which isn't always sure to rise.

The offbeat Kiwi drama made a welcome return last night (TV2, 9.30pm), as a prequel to last year's Insiders Guide to Happiness. Before happiness, comes love.

That the second season arrives as a forerunner to the first isn't surprising for a drama which delights in playing with chronology, running events backwards or even starting in the middle.

Last night's first episode demonstrated just how skilled the writers have become at this. The drama began with a bang as someone fell on the roof of a parked car, then took the full hour to slowly let all the pieces of its complicated, interlocking storylines fall into place.

The trickiness of the structure requires some patience - a novel experience with TV drama these days - but you have to admire its cleverness.

Only one character, James the blokey banker from Wanganui, has been allowed to return for this latest round of philosophical observations about the odd quirks of human fate.

Last night we met him fresh off the bus from smalltown Kiwi-land and eager to embrace apartment life in the Big Smoke.

He didn't have to wait long for some action.

His neighbour, Max, has constructed a highly demanding double life. He's the partner of two women blissfully ignorant of each other's existence, and the father of two sons who share the same birthday.

This litany of lies carries into his professional life, as he sits in his office pretending he's on travel journalism assignments around the world.

Like its predecessor, The Insiders Guide to Love plays with reality, revelling in odd coincidences and improbabilities. Love, after all, is so often an exercise in the highly unlikely. Again it follows a bunch of characters whose lives are much more interconnected than they know.

This second series, too, is equally poetic in tone with long, reflective scenes as, for example, a character pauses, poised on a high diving board, or examines a ladybird. It makes the metaphor about falling in love literal, a device which could be corny but is rescued by inventiveness.

The deliberate naivety of the show mostly comes across as charming and eccentric. Where it gets a bit wearying is when it's laid on too thick, such as when the narrator pontificates: "Love, how do we feel it? Why do we want it? Where does it go when we lose it?"

The action raises these questions, we don't need them spelled out for us.

The characters, too, could do with more depth. So far they feel more like pawns of the elaborate structure than people you can warm to. One pair of lovers, a newly-released prison inmate and his wannabe badass girlfriend, are little more than caricatures.

The Guide will need more than the bravado of its structural cleverness, but there's plenty of time yet for it to warm to its subject matter. For now, it's a bit too distant and cool. A drama about love should appeal to the head and the heart.