The Brokenwood Mysteries has 'storylines so good' people believe the characters are real

New Zealand's whodunit show The Brokenwood Mysteries has marked 10 years on the silver screen.

It is one of the longest running New Zealand TV dramas other than Shortland Street.

The show stars Neill Rea as detective Mike Shepherd and Fern Sutherland as detective Kristin Sims.

Police officer and fan of the show Bryan Ward works in the Rodney district.

He said that placed him right between the Helensville Post Office, which doubles as the Brokenwood police station, and Warkworth, where the Brokenwood township is filmed.

"If I lived in Brokenwood, I'd probably be a little bit alarmed at the amount of serious crime that's going on there," he said.

But Ward said some of the community policing depicted on the show was similar to real policing out on country roads and in small towns.

"That thing of only sort of being two or three degrees of separation, that's quite common, especially up in the Rodney area where people know people," he said.

Less realistic, he said, were some of the costuming choices.

Something that stood out to him watching the show was the number of the uniformed police officers wearing jumpers under their body armor in summer.

"Let me assure you, nobody wears their jumper under a body armor on a hot summer day. It's just way too hot."

Ward had previously met Cristina Serban Ionda, who plays medical examiner Dr Gina Kadinsky on the show, at a police open day not long after Brokenwood had started. He also at the time had his own TV show Bryan and Bobby.

"People were sort of laughing at the two of us together, trying to figure it out whether she was really part of the New Zealand police or not," he said.

"Probably one of the great strengths of that show is the storylines are that good, that people actually believe the characters are real."

Better than CSI

ESR forensic toxicologist Dr Helen Poulsen was also a fan of the show. She had watched every episode and had bought all the DVDs.

Her job involved testing forensic samples for drugs and poisons in the lab.

Poulsen said their work often came from the coroner.

"So you know when Gina does her autopsy and take samples and sends them off to toxicology [...] we analyse those for drugs and poisons to see if they may have been the cause of death."

Poulsen said there was a surprising amount of toxicology included in the show.

"I could pick holes in it, but it's not far off the truth," she said. "Certainly, a lot more accurate than CSI."

But she said one recent example of the science not stacking up was a poison being injected into solid chocolate, which she said would not work.

The show also analysed some forensic evidence that was not possible in real life, she said, but she was keeping that information a secret so people would not know what they could get away with.