Small Australian towns in film and television are always coughing up a steady supply of deaths and disappearances for detectives to investigate. Murder mysteries from the last year alone include the TV shows Black Snow and Savage River and the feature film Limbo. It’s easy to think there is nothing new under the blood-encrusted sun, until something like the spectacularly idiosyncratic Deadloch comes along, packing a helluva punch and pumping new blood into timeworn tropes.
This ripsnorting whodunnit was created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, AKA “the Kates”, best-known for their short-form series The Katering Show and the breakfast TV satire Get Krack!n. They are moving into the next phase of their career, with Deadloch, a narratively richer series that’s dark and dramatic, and often also very funny.
We open with the discovery of a dead body on a beach and a dick joke, when one of the two young women (Kartanya Maynard and Leonie Whyman) who find the corpse accidentally drops a lit ciggie on his pubic hair. Enter senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), whose job policing the titular Tassie town typically involves low stakes, including monitoring the antics of a local seal named Kevin. As Dulcie, Box delivers an excellently restrained and measured performance, impressive on its own terms but additionally important in its provision of a violent, comedic contrast to the “cowboy from Darwin” being flown down to help on the case.
We await the kind of hotshot detective pop culture has conditioned us to expect –perhaps a straight-talkin’, hard-bitten man who doesn’t “do” niceties but gets the damn job done. Instead, the Kates (who wrote the script with Kim Wilson, Christian White, Anchuli Felicia King, Kirsty Fisher and Madeleine Sami) unleash the thunderously loud detective Eddie Redcliffe (Sami, who also appeared in The Breaker Upperers). She has the kind of incorrigible personality and awful fashion sense we might expect but the gender we don’t: one character even exclaims “He’s a woman!” Eddie makes a big entrance, bursting into the cop shop and complaining that it’s “colder than a witch’s tit out there” before asking, “How long has shrivel dick been dead for?”
Was she going to be, I wondered, some kind of eccentric genius – perhaps a detective like the great Columbo, presenting herself as a plain old commoner to win the trust of the people and get the job done? In short, no: she’s an idiot. For a while I couldn’t decide whether Eddie’s exhausting and incongruous presence was making or breaking every scene. Ultimately Sami’s performance was a little too much for me – far louder, shriller and more cartoonishly ’Strayan than any other screen detective I can recall.
Eddie is, however, balanced out with other characters, including Dulcie and two more thoroughly likable local cops light years from the blokey testicle-scratching archetype. They are the sweet, goofy Abby (Nina Oyama) and the similarly gentle and well-meaning doofus Sven (Tom Ballard). All the four key police officers are played by queer actors: the Deadloch force reflects rather modern sensibilities for a sleepy Tassie locale. But the mayor (Susie Youssef) is also a woman, as is the richest and most powerful person in town (Pamela Rabe). And what if more bodies turned up, and they were all straight white men?
For a while I thought the Kates and Deadloch’s directors (Ben Chessell, Gracie Otto and Beck Cole) might be ingeniously steering the series in a direction not dissimilar to the scenario in The Wicker Man remake, with Nicolas Cage arriving on a dangerous island dominated by women. Instead, they’re more interested in presenting Deadloch as a microcosm of society, central to the reality of constant change despite being located on the arse end of the universe. The show doesn’t quite hit the cleverness I thought it was reaching towards but it’s completely addictive and exceptional on many levels, offering – in addition to the usual genre mechanisms – interesting commentary on gender politics and society’s ever-evolving attitudes and mores.
These ideas come into full focus in the last couple of episodes. It might sound a little cliche to say you’ll be guessing all the way to the end, but you really will, with unpredictable pace-propelling twists rolled out from go to whoa. The show’s sombre, darkened aesthetic, with scaled-back colour schemes and an unfriendly sheen (influenced no doubt by Tasmania’s gothic-looking locations) makes the comedic elements all the more interesting, creating a tension between how it looks and feels. The overall package is something else: mean, mordant and murderously amusing entertainment, whipped up with a devil’s grin.
The first three episodes of Deadloch air on Prime Video from 2 June globally, with new episodes available each Friday
