
Alibi: The Kiwi crime drama you can watch in any order
A crime drama that makes you the detective.
Alibi, the new non-linear crime drama from TVNZ might be one of New Zealand’s most innovative TV shows in years. The story, set in the small fictional town of Awatahi, follows a tight-knit community as it attempts to piece together the circumstances of the murder of a young local girl. Pretty standard premise right? The catch is that the six 15-minute episodes can be watched in any order you like. Each episode follows the interrogation of a new suspect and their individual alibi affects all the others. This structure leaves room for you to decide who you think committed the murder, depending on the order you watch it.

Now I’ll be the first to admit the crime drama genre is oversaturated. The good ones are few and far between but let me illustrate what makes Alibi so worthy of your valuable 90 minutes.
Subjective storytelling:
Unlike a plethora of other non-linear shows like Westworld, Sense8 and True Detective, the flashbacks in Alibi are not real reflections of what happened. The director, David de Lautour has strategically changed the way an event is presented depending on who is describing it. Each suspects recollection of an event paints them as a good person and the others as bad. This technique effectively leads you to hunt for the overlapping details which often happen in the background of shots.
Short and sweet:
I watched this whole series in one evening. In the age of 45-minute episodes, it’s refreshing to be able to quickly digest a show that feels longer than it is. Not only does this let you watch all episodes in one sitting, but it also makes the show very rewatchable. For such a detail-laden show, being able to run through it again is a major pro. Add to this the convenience and unintrusiveness of the TVNZ Ondemand website and this show becomes way more convenient than that Netflix/Lightbox/Neon rigmarole.

World Building:
David De Lautour and his team have put a lot of creative energy into this show. Not only is the show tight, clean and aesthetic, but they even went as far as to create a convincing Awatahi Community Facebook page and an Instagram account for one of the characters. As digital natives, we can smell fake social media accounts like a hound, but I am very impressed by how genuine these pages appear. The community Facebook page uses scanned newspaper clippings and bad graphic design to look local, and Malika’s Instagram account has all the swear words and inspirational quotes from a regular teenager’s account.
All in all, this is the kind of Kiwi TV that makes us stand out. It’s encouraging to see TVNZ continue to push creative New Zealand work and I’m excited to see what else they will come up with in the future.

