No one does a feminist/noir/murder comedy series better than Prime Video’s Deadloch creators Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney. And for the two leads of the whodunnit, Madeleine Sami and Kate Box, the writing was not only extraordinary but “revolutionary”.
Season one follows the once sleepy seaside Tasmanian town of Deadloch, which is left reeling when a local man turns up dead on the beach. Two female detectives are thrown together to solve the case: Fastidious local senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Box) and a rough-as-guts blow-in from Darwin, senior investigator Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine) along with their overeager junior constable Abby (Nina Oyama). As the town prepares to launch the annual arts, food, and culture event — Winter Feastival — the trio have to put their differences aside and work together to find the killer.
“They’re such talented writers,” New Zealand-born Sami said in an interview with Mediaweek. “And they always like to come at things with an interesting point of view and I think that’s what sets them apart from a lot of other people. They subvert a lot of things in a very funny and very political way.”
For Box, the script “makes you reflect on what we have accepted as a kind of common culture or common politics”.
“You just go with that sh–,” she said during the same interview. “I think their subversion of the narrative, not just in the genre of crime, but also in kind of our political landscape in Australia is quite magnificent.”
The equally dark and funny series is what Sami calls a “sweet spot”.
“I love to watch things that are able to kind of push me pull me around in different directions and make me think and laugh at the same time,” she said.
Kate Box, Madeleine Sami and Tom Ballard. Prime Video.
Representation in Deadloch comes secondary to the plot of the show
While Deadloch is already flipping the script by having two female detectives on the case, representation of the LGBTQIA+ community plus many other facets of society are heavily portrayed in the series — a true depiction of the microcosm in which we live. For example, Dulcie is married to Cath (Alicia Gardner), and while their relationship is at the forefront of the plot, the fact that they are queer, is not.
When asked how important representation is, Box said: “It’s crucial. Even when you say the sentence, how important is representation? It just feels like such a mad sentence to say. You don’t want to feel like anything is groundbreaking; [however] it feels like a great starting point.”
Kate Box, Kate McLennan, Kate McCarthy and Madeleine Sami.
She continued: “The communities throughout Deadloch that are brought to the front, are just all given such integrity, such humour, such adventure. They are not there for the purpose of the community, they come from there. They are the community.”
Both Box and Sami were two of four leads on the call sheet who were queer, something Sami calls “revolutionary” due to the fact that stories were been told through their “gaze”.
“I think the fact that for a long time, queer stories weren’t told by queer people and therefore there wasn’t the right kind of gaze, and there wasn’t the right kind of issues. There wasn’t the artistic authenticity to the storytelling, or to the community, and when you change that, there’s just this added layer of realness and authenticity to the storytelling and the performances that kind of capture it correctly.”
Stream the first three episodes of Deadloch from June 2 on Prime Video, with the remaining episodes dropping weekly.