Australia is far weirder, bigger and louder than compact little ol’ Aotearoa. I love the place, but it always seems like the swaggering older brother.
The gloriously profane and funny TV series Deadloch feels like the most Australian thing I’ve seen in ages (even though it actually co-stars a famous Kiwi comedian). It’s a foul-mouthed sendup of the broadest and silliest stereotypes about how we imagine Australia – but also an open-heartedly inclusive show.
Deadloch, which just released its second series recently, is a spin on the well-worn buddy cop genre, with Kate Box as brainy, restrained gay detective Dulcie Collins and NZ’s Madeline Sami as Eddie Redcliffe, the most bogan, loud-mouthed sweary Aussie you can imagine, a thong-wearing mess from steamy Darwin who is sent to Tasmania to dig into a crime with Dulcie. Deadloch gradually reveals itself to be a confidently feminist take on all those hoary true-crime cliches.
The duo are a true Mutt-and-Jeff combination, with 6-foot Box towering over Sami. Sami’s Eddie is an incredibly over-the-top agent of chaos, whose energy is nicely balanced out by Box’s analytical Kate (and the inevitable loud clashes between the two of them give the show a lot of its zing). Sami is hilarious belting out a thousand variations on calling someone a c**t.
But it’s actually Box’s Dulcie who feels like the real star of Deadloch – she’s repressed and tense, and Box does a wonderful job showing her slowly open up to Eddie despite her initial revulsion. Deadloch in part is the story of Kate learning to be comfortable with herself.
There’s a million cop and mystery shows out there these days and I don’t have time for most of them (the very phrase “cozy crime” makes my teeth itch), but after visiting Tasmania recently, Deadloch grabbed me with its gorgeous scenery and clever look at what being an Australian really means these days.
Deadloch interrogates the ideas of Aussie bloke and sheila in clever ways – many of the characters besides Dulcie are also queer, and the series never gets more venomous than when it hones in on the corrupt, clueless old boys’ network of local police, who are shown to be toxic men that are impossible to take seriously. Meanwhile, Kate and Eddie just get shit done, although there’s plenty of comic stumbles along the way.
Antagonistic buddy cops have been done to death, but Kate and Eddie are both outsiders in the blokey system, despite their vast differences. It’s not a two-woman show – Deadloch excels in its cast of well-drawn bush eccentrics in both seasons, from Kate’s needy wife Kath and the comic cop sidekicks Abby and Sven, to the drunken sweaty misfits of the Top End or the pretentious old rich blood of Tasmania. It incorporates Australia’s complicated colonial history and historic racism in both subtle and broad ways.
In many ways the murders in Deadloch are less important than the vibe, whether it’s the end-of-the-world chill of Tasmania or the sweaty tension of the Northern Territory. (In the Darwin-set Season 2, everybody seems to be perpetually perspiring.) Australia itself is a third lead in Deadloch, whether it’s spooky rows of gum trees on the Tasmania coast or the primal rumbling of crocs in the waters near Darwin.
Of course it’s broad in its satire – not every person in Darwin is a sweaty mess and Tasmania isn’t all Gothic murdertown – but in embracing so many of the cliches about Australia and gently chucking so many of them under the chin, Deadloch also feels like a love song to these unmistakably, uniquely weird places tucked in at the bottom of the world. The real mystery, in the end, is Australia itself.
Nik Dirga 