TRIPLE TREAT
Forget appointment viewing — Hannah Marshall, David de Lautour and Gareth Williams want you to watch TV a little differently. They talk to Chris Schulz.
WIDE, sweeping shots of gloomy forests and rivers. A dimly lit interrogation room. A body in a bathtub. In the background, spooky music plays.
With scenes like that, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching an acclaimed Danish crime show
like Forbrydelsen (The Killing ),ora gritty American drama in the style of
True Detective.
But you’re not: they’re all scenes from Alibi, a dark Kiwimade whodunnit shot in the style of some of the biggest and best television shows to emerge overseas in the past 10 years.
That, says Alibi’s creators, is exactly the point.
‘‘Denmark is making this really gritty noir stuff and they’ve got the same sized population. Their content translates to an international audience,’’ says Hannah Marshall, onethird of Plus6four, the production team behind Alibi.
David de Lautour, Marshall’s husband, and second member of Plus6four, agrees: ‘‘{The stuff we’re watching overseas . . . we want to try and replicate here.’’
With fellow actor Gareth Williams on board, the three decided if noone else was going to try, they would attempt to do it themselves. So they teamed up to make Alibi, their ambitious first attempt at making a New Zealand TV show with international appeal.
Set in the fictional town of
Awatahi, Alibi examines the death of schoolgirl Jodie Hunter, whose parents are members of a strict religious sect. Each of the six 15minute episodes is told from the point of view of a suspect in her murder: her boyfriend, her best friend, her teacher, a gang boss, a tradesman and a church leader.
But this is not a straight linear watch: Alibi has been designed for viewers to see each 15minute episode randomly, with their experience dictated by the order they choose. On top of that, an online world has been built up around it, containing clues to Jodie’s killer.
That idea came from seeing the growing popularity of online streaming and bingeviewing, says de Lautour, and wanting to expand on that.
‘‘If you have all the episodes at once, why do they have to be in order?’’ he asks. ‘‘We give the audience a lot of credit. From the first episode it’s like, ‘What is going on?’ We don’t spell it out — we just put it there and people will figure it out.’’
So far, it seems to be working. TVNZ quickly hopped on board, the show secured funding from NZ on Air, and the trio used their industry connections to secure bigname actors who deliver standout performances, including Tandi Wright as the lead investigator, Xavier Horan as aggressive gang boss ‘‘X’’, and Joel Tobeck playing church leader Father Sebastian with unblinking intensity.
All six episodes went online at the end of August. A reveal episode, told from the perspective of the investigator, lands on Thursday night.
The obvious question is, whodunnit? Marshall, de Lautour and Williams are not telling — but that has not stopped many trying. Nothing, so far, has worked.
‘‘No way,’’ laughs Marshall. ‘‘We didn’t tell anybody. We’ve been bribed, people have tried to get us drunk to tell them. TVNZ had to force us to tell them. We didn’t tell the actors . . . so noone knew.’’
Marshall says the three discussed taking things even further. ‘‘We toyed with the idea of not ever telling you. That’s true to life,’’ she says. ‘‘You don’t know.’’
She laughs, then admits: ‘‘That wouldn’t have been satisfying at all.’’
What is satisfying is how quickly the show came together. ‘‘It’s been one of those projects where we’ve been waiting for that thing where it goes, ‘Nah, it doesn’t work,’ or, ‘That’s not cool.’ But at the moment it feels like everything’s flowed and we’ve gone along with it. In the writing, it worked. In the shooting, it worked. Now people are starting to watch it we’re like, ‘Is it still working?’ ’’
It’s still working. The show is an easy evening binge, one that quickly wraps you up in its gloomy world. It looks like a million bucks, despite its budget that fell far short of that.
It is still working for the team of three behind it.
‘‘This has gone better than we could have imagined,’’ says Marshall. In fact, it is working so well the trio have already started work on a second season, hopefully with longer episodes.
That is not all: they have just secured funding for their first feature film — and, like Alibi, this one is a little different, too.
‘‘It felt like a long shot putting it in,’’ says de Lautour. ‘‘Instead of those beautiful vistas and green hills that New Zealand is known for, we said, ‘Let’s get into the dark alleys and the gritty cityscapes and show that off.’
‘‘We’re really passionate about telling New Zealand stories, but in a different way.’’ —
Alibi is available to stream now on TVNZ OnDemand. A reveal episode will premiere Thursday.