TVNZ
A robbery and a drug deal gone wrong sets off a chain of events in local drama Vegas.
REVIEW: Waitoki – the town where things get steamy.
That’s the barely fictionalised backdrop for TVNZ’s latest Kiwi drama
Vegas (which debuts on TVNZ2 tonight, Monday, at 8.30pm). Filmed entirely in Rotorua, the $6.4m budgeted, six-part series is based on Ray Berard’s 2015 novel
Inside the Black Horse.
A potent cocktail of a tale involving debts, drugs, gangs and two disparate brothers, it revolves around the build up to and fallout from the life-changing events of a single night.
It was supposed to be the evening when Te Toki ended their reliance on meth sales to find their activities. When one last deal would give them enough money would allow them to buy back some of their ancestral land and give themselves “a place to stand”. Where newly appointed leader Kingi (Eds Eramīha) could prove his mana to the doubters, especially those who believe their former head Waka (Wayne Hapi) should not have passed over his own son Matia (Xavier Horan) to give the role to his “bravest warrior”. But although there were some who queried Kingi’s choice of bagman for the big night, they could never have foreseen that the bar would be the target of an armed robbery at exactly the same time he would be in there with their produce.