The Medium is Not Enough

In New Zealand: Mondays, 8.30pm, TVNZ1
In the UK: Not yet acquired

New Zealand has a habit of making TV shows that look like they’re going to fit in one relatively mundane genre yet end up having a supernatural or sci-fi twist. The Almighty Johnsons would have been just a bunch of brothers behaving badly were it not for the fact they were also descended from Norse gods. Cast your mind back to period drama Children of Fire Mountain and you’ll recall the supernatural hallucinations that drove the narrative, while Children of the Dog Star seemed like a rural coming of age tale, right up until an alien space probe showed up in the nearby swamp.

And now we have One Lane Bridge, which at first seems like a perfectly ordinary “big city cop has a culture clash with a small town cop when the two have to investigate a mysterious death” show. You’ll have seen plenty of those before, but here, the big city cop is a Maori (Dominic Ona-Ariki) and when he starts to investigate the crime, he discovers he has ‘Matakite’ – the gift of second sight and he has visions of the dead.