Ms X marks the spot
South Pacific Pictures CEO Kelly Martin tells DQ about her hopes for upcoming crime dramedy Ms X, offers an education about improv comedy Educators and reveals some of the secrets behind the New Zealand producer’s long-running series The Brokenwood Mysteries.
As a producer and the CEO of New Zealand’s South Pacific Pictures, Kelly Martin has overseen the success of several long-running series, from soap Shortland Street to crime drama The Brokenwood Mysteries.
This year, the exec is hoping to find similar success with the company’s latest scripted series, Ms X. Produced in partnership with Plus6Four Entertainment for Kiwi broadcaster Three and its streaming platform ThreeNow, the show stars Melissa George as a suburban mum who teams up with an old high-school friend to scare her cheating husband into staying faithful. But when things turn (accidentally) homicidal, she is pulled into a criminal underworld, caught between the cops, the cartel and a vicious PTA.
Distributed internationally by Dynamic Television, the six-part series is described as a distinctive and fast-paced crime thriller that is also suspenseful and fun. “It’s an unusual one for us,” Martin tells DQ. For the series, she has partnered with husband-and-wife creators and writers David de Lautour, who directs the show, and Hannah Marshall, South Pacific’s head of development. Along with partner Gareth Williams, the couple are behind Plus6Four Entertainment.
“They’ve got a little company that they’d set up and had been working on this project, so I was like, ‘Well, come and do it with us.’ We did it as a coproduction, but did it under the South Pacific Pictures banner and our more established and grown-up world,” Martin says.
“We’re really happy with it. It’s zeitgeisty. It feels in keeping with a few other things that are out in the world at the moment, in a good way, in terms of crime, but it’s funny and it feels quite real, and there are some silly things that happen. There are great performances and a really nice twisty-turny story that gets us.”
Central to the show is The Slap and In Treatment star George, who is “so good, she’s just remarkable,” says Martin. Number two on the call sheet is Dean O’Gorman, who has been in “a billion different things,” Martin notes, including the Hobbit trilogy and The Almighty Johnsons. “He’s probably a familiar face to people, even if they don’t necessarily know his name – and he is a goddamn great actor. I sit there looking, and he just hits it out of the park with those moments where you know what’s gone into the behind-the-scenes of all this stuff, and watching someone really deliver is so remarkable. We’re really happy with the way the show’s come up.”
Another scripted series on South Pacific’s slate is Educators, an unscripted comedy that Martin likens to HBO’s semi-improvised Larry David hit Curb Your Enthusiasm. With the show focusing on the dysfunctional staff of a Kiwi high school, director Jesse Griffin and the writing team establish an outline for each scene, before the actors are left to run with it in any way they wish. Four seasons have aired on TVNZ.
“There’s a lot of improv, so there’s a ton of time spent in the edit suite to make it all work. But you also get some real gems,” Martin says. “It’s a comedy set in a school with just not-very-good teachers and the principal. They mean well, but they’re pretty shit and it’s genuinely funny. It’s got good laugh-out-loud moments.”
The series is also ripe for guest casting. So far, The Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt and his wife, fellow comedian and actor Julia Davis (Gavin & Stacey), have both appeared, as has actor, writer and director Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows).
“It’s very fun. It’s kind of low-brow. [The characters are] not nice people, genuinely, but it’s very funny and just silly,” Martin says. “The trick with it is casting comedians who can act, but who bring their comedy chops and can do improv. You can get some real gold.”
Meanwhile, fans of The Brokenwood Mysteries can look forward to the 12th season of the long-running series airing this year. Created by showrunner Tim Balme, the show debuted on TVNZ in 2014 and follows detectives Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) and Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland) as they face a series of murders in the titular village. A third detective, Daniel Chalmers (played by Jarod Rawiri), joined the pair in the seventh season.
The series has also become a global favourite, with All3Media International selling it into more than 150 countries worldwide.
Martin attributes The Brokenwood Mysteries’ success to its repeatable format, with each episode tracking a self-contained mystery that is complemented by the central characters’ own quirks and foibles.
“Apart from sometimes going home with Mike Shepherd, where he has a glass of wine and stares out into the bucolic landscape, we very seldom go into their personal lives,” the exec says. “We nudge at it. We hint at it here or there. The characters can make little digs at each other, like, Kristin’s terrible at making coffee, or has she got any friends? But we don’t go deeply into that. The show is about the crime, the people involved in the crime and solving the crime.”
The series “really hums,” says Martin, when a script has the perfect balance of comedy and crime, and the characters are riffing off each other. Much like the cast, many of the same crew members come back year after year to work on the production, which is based in a West Auckland studio and utilises much of the surrounding environments and landscapes – from beaches and forests to paddocks and wineries.
“That’s unheard of. They all come back and they all enjoy working together, and that shows on screen as well,” Martin says. “There’s a level of enjoyment that comes through to the audience. So it’s a crime show, but a crime show where something really crazy has happened, and you’ve probably laughed a couple of times through the process of it.”
With season 12 taking the series to 60 episodes, Martin says the challenge now on The Brokenwood Mysteries is for it not to become too silly or for the characters to turn into caricatures of themselves.
“It’s about having fun with that, but not going so far that it’s ridiculous,” she says. “This last season, they’ve had some good times with Mike and his old Holden Kingswood. There was a suggestion at one point that he might trade up for a more modern car – that was quite tense. That car is a character in the show. It’s been endangered multiple times.”
She adds: “When we got to 10 years, none of us could quite believe it. When Tim’s doing the writing, he will always come and say, ‘Should I be writing an end?’ I keep saying, ‘Not yet, not yet.’”
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tagged in: Educators, Kelly Martin, Ms X, Plus6Four Entertainment, South Pacific Pictures, The Brokenwood Mysteries, Three, ThreeNow