“Deadloch” Delivers Australian Lesbians, Murder Mysteries, and Hilarity

Every week for the past two months, someone or another has commented on our Boobs On Your Tube column about the Australian comedy/mystery series Deadloch, so I finally had to check it out for myself. Sure enough, the hype was warranted, because this show about a small seaside town with an unusually high lesbian population combines my three favorite things in a TV show: queer women, murder mysteries, and humor. Bonus points for the fun accents.

See, the thing about Deadloch (population just over 2000 people) is that, all of a sudden, the men of the town start turning up dead. Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins has a team that consists of a nervous newbie and a useless boy, so her boss sends her help in the form of Detective Eddie Redcliffe. Dulcie and Eddie are two very different women, and watching them try to work together (or, more often, in spite of each other) is consistently delightful.

I won’t spoil the whole investigation or the mystery but I will say this: of course when local men start dying, people start blaming the “man-hating lesbians” but as Dulcie and Eddie investigate they start to wonder if the lesbians in question aren’t helping with their investigation because they’re in on it or if the men were just missing persons who nobody missed at all. And as specific queer women are called into question, it was refreshing to not have to do quick panic-math of “is this the kind of show that would villainize the only lesbian” because there are an endless supply of queer women in this town, quite the feat in a place so small the only doctor is also the mayor.

So not only did it mean any queer woman was viable to keep on the (long) list of suspects, but it also didn’t feel insulting or hurtful. When you have at least four named and highly developed queer female characters, plus a meditation class full of other oft-present queer secondary characters, it doesn’t feel like a slap in the face to accuse one or two of them of murder. In fact, all of the jokes made at lesbians’ expense were either flung carelessly from the mouth of an established asshole of a man, or felt very inside jokey, made by us for us. The show laughs with us, never at us.

Queer actors on the job!

And this makes sense considering how many queer people are working behind the scenes on this show. Created by comedy duo Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (as far as I can suss from Google, at least one of The Kates is queer, but maybe Australians can provide better insight on that one), the cast is full of queer women, including some queer women who play straight women on the show. Dulcie is played by queer Wentworth actress Kate Box, who is married to a non-binary actor Jada Alberts, who was also on Wentworth. Eddie Redcliffe is played by Madeleine Sami, who uses she/they pronouns and was formerly married to singer Ladyhawke. Abby, their plucky junior detective who is smarter than she gives herself credit for is played by queer actress Nina Oyama. Plus, there are some actors who have played queer and/or been on queer classics, like Kris McQuade and Pamela Rabe (aka THE Joan Fergeson) from Wentworth.

And that’s just what I could find as an American with no backgroudn\ knowledge of most of these actors; it’s possible I missed some! (This research had me wondering if Australian TV is small like Canadian TV or if Wentworth is Australia’s Law & Order franchise and all their actors probably made an appearance on it at one point or another. Or maybe it’s more like The L Word and it’s a queer show circuit. Either way I was amused at how many times Wentworth came up.)

All this talk about Wentworth is making me miss Wentworth.

If you’re hesitant to watch this because it’s a technically cop show, know that I was too, but also it’s worth noting that the Australian cop system (while probably still corrupt in its own ways; it’s at the very least sexist if this show is correct) is different than it is in the US, most notably in that I don’t even remember seeing a cop holding a gun at all until the very last episode when an outsider cop handed one of Deadloch’s cops a gun and he said no thank you and put it down. So it’s not the kind of shoot-em-up situation even the lightest of American buddy cop shows tend to be.

All these press stills are so much more serious than the show actually is.

Overall the show is fun and intriguing and I found myself looking forward to it week after week. It’s a great flip of the same old “women are being murdered” pattern we see too often in real life, and thus very often in crime shows. Plus, it has emotional beats but also so much comedy. Sometimes it’s stressful because people are yelling over each other and no one is listening to each other, but some of the funniest moments emerge from those instances. There are also some great comedy bits by the nosy Aboriginal teens who are clever and hilarious, plus an A+ placement of a dramatic cover of t.A.T.u’s All the Things She Said. If that doesn’t prove to you that this show is made by queer people, for queer people, I don’t know what will.

All eight episodes of Deadloch are available now on Prime Video.