Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan are comedic geniuses with a flair for the satirical absurdity. Deftly lathering up the unfair ugliness that lurks just beneath the brilliant whiteness of Australia's morning TV scene on Get Krack!n and skewering the insufferable cult food trends in The Katering Show cooking parody spot, his observations are hilarious with Capital F with a stinging barb.
So the promise that they pursue these themes while upending crime shows' most troubling tropes and smothering them in the popular consciousness on Prime Video's Deadloch is an appealing one.
Creators: Kate McCartney, Kate McLennan
Stars: Kate Box, Madeleine Sami, Alicia Gardiner
The sleepy rhythm of the sleepy Tasmanian town of the same name is disturbed when the disfigured body of local man Trent Latham (Barry Wheeler) washes up on the beach, just like a winter festival of fusion art and fancy food not unlike to the headline from Hobart: Looking for winter rampage Dark MOFO brings a group of highly lucrative tourists to the city. (The roll call of festival guests with verified but unseen names is a huge gag.)
Two young First Nations women, Miranda (Kartanya Maynard) and her cousin Tammy (Leonie Whyman), an AFL hopeful, literally stumble over Trent's dead body, and the latter spills her guts and the joint. 'Shit, his penis is on fire.'
It's a fantastically fun opening gambit, with the point being that this naked corpse is a guy (presumably straight) hanging in the air like a breath of air on a crisp winter morning. While Twin Peaks opened with Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic, she was, if nothing else, an integral part of everyone's suspected David Lynch story. Too many genre entries before and since used women's bodies as minor plot points, completely stripped of agency.
McCartney and McLennan establish that Deadloch will be different, up to a point. But it's probably worth tempering expectations that the show will be a clever parody of the genre.
Trent's unfortunate end irritates diving mayor Aleyna (Susie Youssef), who is furious that she might disrupt the nightly Winter Festival lantern parade. You feel like local cop Dulcie Collins (Wentworth's Kate Box) relishes the opportunity to sink her teeth into an intriguing case that estranges her from her beloved but stifling wife Cath (Offspring star Alicia Gardiner).
However, this version is short-lived. A goofy colleague further up the chain rings in Darwin's prolific detective Eddie Redcliffe, played by Australian-accented filmmaker and The Breaker Upperers star Madeleine Sami.
A show like this obviously relies on the good cop/bad cop approach, but Sami's obnoxious and loud Eddie quickly derails Deadloch. What's not to like about an all-out, permanently cursing, wildly uncaring outsider who tramples the locals while jumping to the most basic conclusions humanly possible, one might ask?
While there are no lines of denial like, 'Which one of you motherfuckers is leaking like an old cow's teat?' are incredibly funny, the fact that Eddie just talks like that, at the top of his lungs, gets a bit off. bored. Sami's overly broad reading of her character reduces her to a major pain in the ass, with the show's oddly swinging tone undermining both comedy and crime drama.
Usually a charismatic presence, Plus Box goes so far the other way that Dulcie is a bit of a bore, making many scenes of her together a bit of a jarring task.
Utopia star Nina Oyama and fellow comedian-turned-actor Tom Ballard strike a better balance as young cop Abby, who juggles managing her impending wedding, and her goofier colleague Sven, who never pass up a lazy opportunity to delegate. Gardiner's eager vet morning tea delivery man, and the insecurities behind Cathy's scalloped love for Dulcie, is the most intriguing way the pressures of a spiraling case like this impact a small town.
Sadly, Deadloch is, for the most part, frustratingly straight (despite the town's much-commented overrepresentation of lesbians) and not particularly original, a small town where everyone is a suspect and uncovered secrets pile up as fast as the bodies on the loose. the beach. It's a shame, because McCartney and McLennan have interesting things to say about how gender, race, and sexuality generally play out on shows like this. It just gets a little lost in the playbook procedure.
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