A camera hovers over two teenage girls walking through a forest and onto a deserted beach. If this were your standard thriller, they’d be the killer’s prey. But Deadloch, an Australian Amazon Prime series, has something very different in mind: one of the girls literally trips over a dead, naked man who’s washed up on the beach, leaving her eye-level with the stiff’s penis. She inadvertently sets his pubes on fire with a dropped cigarette, and her companion promptly pukes all over the carcass.
Welcome to the Tasmanian town of Deadloch! It’s the site of a simmering culture war between the blue-collar, old-school residents and a recent influx of lesbians who’ve put the place on the map, bringing performance art and gourmet nose-to-tail dining with them. That’s on top of the much older turf war between the area’s indigenous inhabitants and the white settler families who colonized this island off the southern coast of Australia.
And welcome also to Deadloch, a delightful series that starts out seeming like a satire of somber, melancholy crime dramas like Broadchurch, The Bridge, and Top of the Lake—complete with moody aerial shots of the landscape, a haunting choral score and a hard-bitten female policewoman, Dulcie Collins (Kate Box)—but ends up succeeding as an addictive thriller, a charming portrait of an oddball community and a crash course in Aussie slang. By the end, you'll be throwing around references to utes, nangs, and norks.
Creators Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney say the project’s original working title was Funny Broadchurch. The humor arrives with Eddie Redcliffe (Madeline Sami), a detective sent over from the mainland to supervise Dulcie’s murder case. She is a sloppy and obnoxious presence in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals who can’t bother to learn anyone’s name (she calls junior constable Abby Matsuda “Big Eyes”) and curses with the manic creativity of a sailor on meth. Over the coming days she will tell a local bigwig, “I’m going to staplegun your nutsa*ck to a f*cking wall” and insist without evidence that some local bros created a “Deadc*nt Drug Ring” and “were up to their scrotes in drugs.” Eddie will do and say anything to close the case, so determined is she to get out of Deadloch, “an arctic pisshole of a town.”
The odd couple matchup is a standard feature of the crime noir genre—particularly the skirmishes and territorial jousting that ensue when an outsider detective is sent to supervise a local case. Dulcie and Eddie’s pairing is initially an extreme version of that: a conscientious crimefighter tethered to an unhinged Muppet. But as the cadavers stack up, the ever-expanding case erodes Eddie’s secrets and emotional defenses. Gradually, she becomes less cartoony. Dulcie is also forced to look critically at her own community. She is too emotionally connected to think clearly about potential suspects, as Eddie points out: “You cannot see the forest for the lesbians.”
By midway through the eight-episode season, the two women have developed a more symbiotic partnership. Which is just as well, because there’s an enormous pressure on them to find the killer. The police commissioner of Tasmania, a patronizing patriarch, is losing confidence in the women and moves to take over. “He told me that I was hysterical and ruled by the moon, and then he hung up on me,” Dulcie says at one point.
Deadloch’s first female mayor, Aleyna Rahme (Susie Yussef) is also on the rampage, terrified that the murder spree will scare off visitors to her annual Winter Feastival—which is slated to feature endurance art, carrot wanking, mushroom meditation, a four-hour movie called Poseidon’s Uterus, and performances by musician Amanda Palmer. My favorite event is the angelic a cappella rendition of “I Touch Myself,” the Divinyls ode to masturbation, as sung by the town’s all-female choir, which includes Dulcie and her aggressively touchy-feely wife, Cath (Alicia Gardner). But will the Feastival end up as a Corpsapalooza? All the anxiety is giving Mayor Aleyna IBS. “My colon is shredded,” she shouts at Dulcie. “Shredded!”
While it’s Eddie and Dulcie that command the storyline, a menagerie of brilliantly written and acted townsfolk and lower-ranking police round out the picture beautifully: the indigenous teen football player trying to get a scholarship that would get her out of this dead-end village, the priest who’s written his own crime drama screenplay, the arrogant forensic pathologist more interested in pitching Ted Talks than in helping the detectives solve the crime. The latter also happens to be the condescending fiancé of junior constable Abby (Nina Oyama), and he undermines her at every turn. Watching her investigative acumen gradually shine through is one of the show’s most enjoyable trajectories.
A homegrown daughter of Deadloch, Abby recalls that the town used to be a place where a woman’s only option was pregnancy. LGBTQ kids got mercilessly bullied. Now the tables have turned and some of the local men, feeling embattled, are nursing “Make Deadloch Great Again” fantasies. Can they turn back the clock? You might as well try, as Eddie colorfully says at one point, “to shove a fart back up a bum.”
