Grab your tissues, there’s a new David Lomas show on the telly. 

There are plenty of things to cry about these days. Fuel prices are astronomical, the weather is terrifyingly unpredictable, and Mint Slice biscuits keep shrinking to the point where they will soon be no bigger than a 10 cent piece. But amid all the catastrophic news headlines and depressing biscuit shrinkflation, there is one thing in this desperate world that is guaranteed to get the waterworks flowing, no matter what – and that’s the sight of David Lomas, standing on a beach, talking to a stranger on a cellphone. 

David Lomas has been making sooks like me bawl since 2009, when he started reuniting long-lost New Zealanders on his documentary series Missing Pieces. Since then, Lomas’s TV show titles may have changed – Missing Pieces became Lost and Found, which then became David Lomas Investigates – but the format has remained the tearjerking same. In each episode, Lomas is contacted by New Zealanders searching for lost loved ones, and come hell or high water (probably created by my tears), Lomas will overcome the obstacles of time and distance to bring those family members back together. 

In his latest series David Lomas: Breakthrough (which received $1.6 million in NZ on Air funding), Lomas wants to solve family mysteries that have persisted for years. He travels around the country to meet New Zealanders searching for a long-lost parent or a sibling, listening thoughtfully while they share their personal and heartbreaking stories with him. Then, Lomas returns to his beautiful boat shed office somewhere in Auckland, where he makes lots of phone calls and introduces himself in his typically staccato delivery (“Hello. I’m. David. Lomas.”). He also does a lot of research on his laptop while looking nervously at his watch. 

Time is precious to Lomas, because it can take an agonising number of years for him to find all the pieces of a family puzzle and put them back together again. In Breakthrough’s first episode, Lomas meets Shararah from Christchurch, who is seeking her Iranian father who left New Zealand three decades ago when she was a baby. Lomas discovers (years before the current conflict began) that Sha’s father lives near Tehran and is initially reluctant to meet his daughter, and, complicated by Iran’s tumultuous political landscape and Sha’s father’s ill health, it takes Lomas three long years to make the possibility of a reunion happen. 

In episode two, David meets 21-year-old Tobias, who’s also looking for his father. Tobias grew up in foster care, but has the support of his mother in locating his father, who they understand was deported to Tonga as an overstayer many years ago. Tobias has never met his father, and mum Annaleah wants her son to fill in the missing pieces of his identity and culture. “It means he gets closure, to know where he comes from,” she says. “I hope to God that this ends really happy for him.” 

So much rests on those investigative phone calls from Lomas’s boat shed, and the first time I start blubbering is when Lomas tells Sha that not only has he found her father, but that he has changed his mind and does want to meet his daughter. It’s the news Sha has waited all her life to hear, and by the time they prepare to reunite in person, I’m a snivelling wreck. After all these years of waiting and wondering, Sha is understandably nervous and emotional, and Lomas stands beside her, asking questions like “how are you feeling?” You know how I’m feeling, David Lomas. Chuck me in a boat shed of my own, lest my tears wash us all away.  

But it’s not until the reunion that I reach peak blubbering status. Through my dripping eyes, it always strikes me that after so many years of waiting and wondering, it only takes a few simple steps for such a remarkable, life-changing moment to occur – Sha walks down an ordinary Armenian street to where her father and brother are waiting, while in the next episode, Tobias takes a short walk down a muddy Katikati farm driveway. As the background music soars, Tobias is welcomed into the open arms of his father. “Two people who had never seen each other five minutes ago are instantly bonded as father and son,” Lomas tells us. It gets me every time. 

The world may be falling to pieces, but old mate David Lomas is putting it back together, one family at a time. Like the Lomas shows that came before it, Breakthrough reminds us of the fallibilities of human nature, and that lives are often lived under the heavy weight of regret and remorse. And yet, Lomas always leaves us with hope. We don’t see the reality of what happens to these families when the cameras stop filming, but in times like this, we need to take whatever moments of joy and happiness we can. A warm embrace, the power of human connection, families reunited at last. And my tissue box? Completely empty. 

David Lomas Breakthrough streams on ThreeNow and screens on Three on Tuesdays at 8.30pm.