Deadloch (TV series). Created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan; directed by Ben Chessell, Gracie Otto, and Beck Cole. Amazon Prime Video, 2023.
I watched this series late last autumn. I held my breath during the last episode, less from the suspense of wondering who did it, and more from the suspense of doubting whether this brilliant, funny show could possibly end well.
Reader, it did. I immediately re-watched the whole series with my partner. I started recommending it to everyone. And then I started hesitating to recommend it, much as I hesitate, now, to recommend Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) – because how will our friendship survive if they don’t like it?
Deadloch unfolds in small-town Tasmania, where a series of murders lays bare the tensions over who gets to claim this place: the Indigenous Palawa community, the white settler ‘townies’, or the new wave of lesbians and hippies who are coming to Deadloch to reinvent themselves? If that all sounds quite serious, well, it is, and it isn’t. Deadloch is devastatingly funny. I’ve seen it described as a satire and as a parody, and while both those labels work, neither quite captures what makes it work. This is a parody of crime shows that loves crime shows, a satire of earnest hippy lesbian culture that deeply, deeply loves earnest hippy lesbian culture, a sharp take on Australian gender and race politics that never loses its sense of humour.
I warned you I’m a fan, right?
Take the opening sequence. Two teenagers – cousins Miranda and Tammy – come across a dead man on the beach. Hungover, stoned, one of them stumbles and accidentally sets his pubic hair on fire with her lit joint. And, go! I’ve basically stopped reading crime novels that open with the discovery of a dead teenage girl. Just, enough already. Deadloch signals from the start that it’s going to be the opposite of that.
Cut to the house of our heroine, Deadloch senior sergeant Dulcie Collins. She’s having sex with her wife, Cath. They’re both trying to ignore their dog, who is watching them in that … way that will be familiar to anyone who has lived with a dog or a cat. The camera pans lovingly over the details of their house. Pulses and grains from some zero-waste shop in hand-labelled glass jars. A basket holding two phones – quarantined for work-life balance, we later learn. Finally the dog jumps on the bed and the moment is lost.
I rarely have the pleasure of consuming media that so thoroughly captures my own particular queer subculture – or a close cousin of it. From the big-shot foodie lesbian Skye O’Dwyer, to the lantern parade and the community choir and the ‘Feastival’, to the conversations about IVF and gender fluidity, to the snacks and the emotional processing, everything in this show felt spot-on and delightful. I found myself wondering: Is this what it’s like to be mainstream and watch mainstream television? This isn’t a show about queerness, not really, although it does reflect on some of the challenges of gay rural life. It’s just a show where the tortured, emotionally repressed lead detective also has to go to couples’ therapy and do the work around her ambivalence regarding her wife’s dream of owning a farm with a compost system and a dog motel. This is my ACTUAL LIFE, I excitedly texted a friend, who to be fair was probably bewildered when he finally watched it, since I’m definitely not a police officer in Tasmania.
Deadloch ultimately works because it is so finely balanced and so beautifully crafted. It adheres to the Golden-Age rules of the Detection Club. The viewer has all the clues they need to solve the mystery. Smart critiques of settler colonialism appear in brief exchanges, so lightly that you could almost miss how perfectly constructed they are. The subverted ‘welcome to country’ at the Feastival might be the single best moment of the first episode, for example. Watching the show a second time, I’m not sure there’s a single wasted line. And yet there’s room for playfulness, from Eddie’s hilarious quips and hijinks, to the little details, like the sign in the outdoor supply shop: “Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents.”
Deadloch dangles tropes like trinkets on a charm bracelet, but never loses its own moral compass. Never merely satire or parody, it is self-deprecating, self-aware, and the best thing I’ve watched in a long time. Now just don’t tell me if you don’t like it.
I watched Deadloch on Amazon Prime. I didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry.