The 'Recipes for Love and Murder' Trailer is Cooking Up Something Good

Over the past few years, most of the non-U.K. offerings on Acorn TV have usually hailed from down under, either Australia or New Zealand, with a few Irish or Canadian shows thrown in for good measure and a couple of Scandi-noir series as foreign language offerings. But the streaming network's newest mystery, Recipes for Love and Murder, is the rare South African-produced series to make its way to the platform. Based on the Tannie Maria Mystery Series by novelist Sally Andrew, and set in her hometown of the Klein Karoo, the story of a pair of newspaper writers turn amateur detectives looks to serve up a  brand new hit series.

Initially announced in November 2021, the new series is a collaboration between Acorn TV and M-Net, the South African pay cable network. The series is also produced by Telepool's Global Screen out of Germany and the South African outfit, Both Worlds Pictures, whose founder, Thierry Cassuto, is the show's executive producer. Cassuto told Variety he initially approached Andrew's people about adaptation rights, which they granted once he promised the show would be an internationally produced and distributed title. Filming commenced when the series was announced, with Season 1's initial run on M-Net in the spring of 2022 after the world premiere of the series' first two episodes in Berlin.

The series, which currently runs three novels, features Tannie Maria (Tannie is Afrikaans for "Auntie" and considered a respectful way to address an older woman), a middle-aged recipe columnist. When the local Gazette cancels her column in favor of a weekly Agony Aunt (advice column), Maria volunteers to put aside her love of food for others' love lives until the author of a letter she runs in her column winds up dead. Over the three stories, including the titular Recipes for Love and Murder, The Satanic Mechanic, and Death on the Limpopo, she and junior reporter Jessie September become detectives tracking down killers.