SEPTEMBER 7 2019 LISTENER 71
TV REVIEW
W
aiheke noir: why not?
Three’s new
crime drama, The
Gulf, does to the
sunny, picturesque, wine-
drowsy Hauraki Gulf island
what Jane Campion’s Top of
the Lake did to Queenstown:
roughs it up a bit and glee-
fully exploits the haunted,
slightly psychotic vibe of
New Zealand’s less-peopled
places. Our landscapes so
evocatively hosted The Lord
of the Rings’ goblins and
dragons for a reason.
There be monsters in The
Gulf, too. In a scene straight
out of The Twilight Zone,
we find ourselves, one dark
and misty night, on a lonely
Waiheke road. A child steps
out in front of a bus driven by a scary
long-haired apparition (a welcome
sighting of Phillip Gordon), who
looks as if the next stop on his run
might not be Matiatia wharf but the
ferry across the Styx to Hades.
The boy has reappeared after
going missing, presumed drowned,
five years earlier. From here, endless
contemporary crime-show tropes
unreel. The excellent Kate Elliott is
Jess Savage, the de rigueur unsmiling
detective in an anorak battling her
demons. “Not my first choice,” she
sneers, when Ido Drent’s enigmaticA haunting new
police procedural
avoids the pitfalls
of other local
productions.
Disinterring Kiwi crime drama
The Gulf
gleefully
exploitsthe slightly
psychotic
vibe of NewZealand’s less-
peopled places.detective, Justin Harding, is suggested as her part-
ner. Grumpy? Fair enough. She’s staggering around
swallowing fistfuls of painkillers and battling amne-
sia after surviving a graphically filmed car crash
that killed her man. She looks as if she should be
in intensive care. She arguably helped screw up the
missing boy’s case five years ago. Yet, they let her
back on the newly opened investigation, because
we now live in an age where “lunatics running the
asylum” no longer counts as a metaphor.
There’s a touch of the jollier The Brokenwood Mys-teries, as everyone on the island takes turns looking
hunted and suspicious to put us off the scent.
The boy’s story is set to be resolved in episode
two. Never mind. There’s the long game: it’s
beginning to look as if someone might be out to get
Jess. I have an inkling who it is. I hope I’m wrong
because right now The Gulf is avoiding many of
the pitfalls of much local television crime drama,
including punishing predictability. The cast are
happily failing to stand around explaining the plot
to each other. The dialogue is snappy and blissfully
minimal, deploying a lot of breathing, moaning
and inarticulate cries of rage. This leaves room for a
bit of psychological depth: the title refers to a body
of water and to the space between people, as theevocative Big Little Lies-style opening
theme indicates. It’s not often you
wish the opening titles lasted longer.T
he plot requires a certain
suspension of disbelief about
the crime’s motivation, and the
creative incompetence of the police
involved. On one occasion, two of
them seem to forget there’s a bad guy
with a gun trained on them. Rookie
mistake. And, occasionally,
an ongoing aggravation
of local drama rears its
head: why do characters
always ask for things to
be gone over with a “fine
toothcomb”, as if it’s a comb
for teeth, instead of a “fine-
tooth comb”, which has the
advantage of making sense.
Please stop it.
Still, Waiheke looks
atmospheric as heck, like an
earlier iteration of the island
when there were fewer wine
tastings, no artisanal gelato
and locals bucketed around
dirt roads in cars that defied
warrants of fitness. There
isn’t much of the aimless
wandering in the bush that
besets many local productions. In the
grand tradition of Mercy Peak’s “I’ll
put on the broccoli”, The Gulf offers
at least one deathless line of Kiwi
television dialogue: “I want you to
disinter the dog.”
There could be more laughs –
even Broadchurch had its wisecracks- but this German-New Zealand
co-production is taut and compelling.
When a local police drama makes
me tear up a couple of times, with a
feeling other than disappointment,
I’m in. l
DIANA
WICHTEL
THE GULF, Three, Monday, 8.30pm.Battling her demons:
Jess Savage (Kate
Elliott) in The Gulf.