It's a familiar scene: In the blue pre-dawn light, two bored teenagers wander off for a smoke, focused only on finding a quiet corner of their sleepy small town to get their kicks in, when they quite literally stumble upon a dead body, naked and cold on the beach. They react with shock, revulsion, and— "Aw shit, his dick's on fire!" Their precious spliff has been dropped right into the cadaver's pubes, where it smoulders next to the gentle curve of the dead man's fully nude penis.
This is the first scene of Prime Video's Deadloch, an Australian "feminist noir" series set in Lutruwita — the crotch-shaped landmass below the continent's south-east coast, known since colonisation as Van Diemen's Land and then Tasmania.
In the next scene, we meet Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), the no-nonsense local cop who is still an outsider after five years in town, and her wife Cath (Alicia Gardiner), the warm and garrulous local vet. Dulcie gets the call about the body on the beach; her glad-handing, work-shy police chief breezily asks about the body and if "she" has been sexually assaulted, before Dulcie informs him the victim is male.
"Is it?" he says mildly. "This sorta thing you just presume it’s a woman."
Deadloch flips tired murder-mystery clichés
Swerving hard around an exploitative Dead Girl plot is just the first of the many ways Deadloch slyly flips some of the most tired murder-mystery clichés, or at least pokes them with a stick. Gendered tropes around cops, wives, men, women, and murderers have been challenged at almost every step so far (five of the eight Season 1 episodes have aired as of this writing).
That's not to say that Deadloch is some kind of tiresome, didactic feminist chore. Each twist feels as organic and fresh as the town's local produce; the thrill of constantly having narrative assumptions challenged by the story keeps the viewer on their toes. And in case the prominent singed pubes in the cold open didn't tip you off, it's also very, very funny.
In case the prominent singed pubes in the cold open didn't tip you off, it's also very, very funny.
The core of it is Box's heroically staunch performance: Dulcie is fifty shades of exasperated, straitlaced, self-flagellating, and highly competent. She's surrounded by both well-meaning but feckless millennial baby-cops (Tom Ballard and stealth MVP Nina Oyama) and townsfolk who are mostly more fixated on the Winter Feastival's nose-to-tail menu launches and endurance art pieces and their own personal grudges than the literal murderer in their midst.
Dulcie's also dealing with Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), a tropical storm of a detective sent down from Darwin, the Florida Panhandle of Australia; she's washed-up, unwashed, and refuses to actually partner with Dulcie to work the case. (You can smell Sami's performance through the screen, and her scenery-chewing crassness feels over the top for a moment before you realise you're just not used to seeing women characters be this gross. She makes Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids look like, well, Rose Byrne in Bridesmaids, and it's glorious.)
Gird your loins for a heaving dollop of Australianness
Of course, so many of the laughs also stem from the sheer Australianness of the dialogue; if you're sensitive to C-bombs, even used affectionately as we Australians do, gird your loins. ("I loved that cunt like a brother!" cries one character, upon learning the identity of the beach body. "He was your brother," Dulcie reminds him dryly.)
Eddie, who pisses crudely evocative bon mots, describes Darwin as the city of "24/7 thrush and feral pigs the size of hatchbacks". Junior officer Sven (Ballard) helpfully notes that there are nangs (empty nitrous oxide canisters, aka whippits) in the bushes at the crime scene; Dulcie patiently dismisses them as "pre-existing nangs".
The effect is something like the love child of Letterkenny's hyper-local, hyper-verbal comedy, and scenic women-led downers like Broadchurch or Top of the Lake. Also, about every third character is a lesbian (a fact noted resignedly by the town's sole unproblematic straight cis man, who looks at Eddie like she's Margot Robbie). Deadloch evidently creates and/or attracts more than its fair share of queer women, and there's a simmering tension in the town between the good-ol'-boys, footy-club-and-beers culture receding like a hairline and the cheerful recycling-foodie-lesbian-yoga vibes that represent its viable future. (This is not just this fictional town, either — Lutruwita/Tasmania broadly has a more left-leaning population than most other states and territories in Australia, as well as an increasing reliance on food, nature, and arts tourism.)
The town's standard-issue creeps and arseholes are skin-crawlingly well cast; surveying the list of suspects, Dulcie declares the town's men "a veritable urine trough of violent, abusive, misogynist bullies". But as is so often the case, it's not as simple as One Bad Man.
Deadloch could be one the best crime shows of the year
Episode 4 ends with a stunning needle drop and an otherwise wordless, exhilarating montage showing the audience a side of the central mystery they've likely been ignoring. But then Deadloch's creators are no strangers to the bait and switch. Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney rose to cult fame in Australia as the stars and writers of The Katering Show(opens in a new tab), a scrappy cooking show parody that began its life on YouTube. They followed it with Get Krack!n(opens in a new tab), a deliciously unhinged breakfast-TV satire that in its last ever episode Trojan-horsed one of the best and most furious moments of Australian TV in recent memory: a blistering monologue on the vile racism of white media commentators and the country's treatment of First Nations people and refugees, co-written and delivered direct to camera with precision and fire by Larrakia actor Miranda Tapsell.
Deadloch feels similar at times: it's all fun and games and dick jokes and "Lightning Crashes" singalongs for now, but there's a whiff of simmering rage under it all. If it can stick the landing in the second half of the series, it'll be one of the best crime shows of the year; as it is, it's certainly the funniest.
How to watch: The first five episodes of Deadloch are now streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes each Friday.(opens in a new tab)
