Kyle and Budgie are two guys from England vacationing in the Cook Islands when they try a local beverage held sacred by the locals – and have an out of this world experience. In Kyle’s case, that may have included a murder.
Tatau (BBC America, Saturdays, 10/9C) is a fascinating new series that shows a lot of promise.
Tatau’s series premiere opens with an office drone sketching a design on a pad of paper before looking at a photo of himself with a beautiful woman. Someone drops a file on his desk and he puts the photo in a desk drawer. Cut to two guys approaching a beach bar on an island in the Cook Islands.
We learn they are Kyle (Joe Layton) and Budgie (Theo Barklem-Biggs). They’re there to try the local hallucinogenic beverage, Avatavi, and things get pretty trippy – to the point that Kyle sees a young Maori woman with a beautiful tattoo who seems to be asking for his help.
The next day, while snorkeling, he sees her body – tied up and weighted down – and calls the police. When they return to the location, there’s nothing there. Eventually, Kyle sees some photos of the woman, whose name is Aumea (Shushila Takao) and learns that she is at university on the mainland of New Zealand – but he knows what he saw.
Meanwhile, we’re learning that Budgie isn’t the happy vacationing lad we thought he was when he gets a call from his mother’s phone. At this moment, we learn that he isn’t going to just be the show’s comic relief.
The series premiere of Tatau, created and written by Richard Zajdlic, is an engaging set up for what appears to be a supernatural murder mystery. Its cast is solid, the locations exquisite and the way it plays with time and the supernatural is intriguing – elements like the tattoo Kyle gets prior to leaving Croydon for his vacation in the Cook Islands, turns out to have meaning to the people of this place he’s never been before; or the way he meets the living Aumea, who is not quite exactly like he saw in his hallucinations (which might not even be hallucinations).
The premiere moves at a somewhat leisurely pace for the most part. Director Wayne Che Yip only really plays with pacing during the hallucinatory scenes, where pacing slows and quickens to various degrees. He creates an atmosphere of dread in the sunniest and most cheerful of locales – helped immeasurably by Layton’s slow burn/quick action take on Kyle.
Tatau has a quiet intensity that is very different from that of Orphan Black. The phrase ‘slow burn’ applies once again (or still…). It’s not really trying to do much more than intrigue and entertain – there’s no serious examination of the nature of identity, or anything like that. In a way, it’s a perfect show to follow Orphan Black – it allows the viewer to decompress from that show’s more urgent intensity while not sacrificing much in the way of quality.
I came away from the first episode of Tatau wanting to know what happens next. That is no small consideration.
Final Grade: B+
Photos by Kirsty Griffin/Courtesy of BBC America