Australian Murder Series isn’t a particularly catchy title for a television show, but it’s what Kate McCartney suggests that Deadloch, the hit crime-comedy that she co-created, co-writes and co-showruns with Kate McLennan, could be called instead.
That naming approach might fit Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story and American Crime Story – and Deadloch is as gleefully Aussie as a TV series can be – but such a generic moniker wouldn’t do justice to a show that was one of the best new arrivals, Australian or otherwise, of the 2020s, and now returns with an equally smart, bold and hilarious second season.
It’d also rob Deadloch of a great gag, riffing on McLennan’s Victorian hometown of Mortlake. As fans of cooking-show satire The Katering Show and breakfast TV parody Get Krack!n know will be well aware, The Kates’ ability to layer their work with jokes wherever possible, rewarding countless rewatches, is second to none.
So is the sharp aim of their jokes – including when they’re skewering colonial place names. Calling attention to Australia’s racial and gender politics is as central to Deadloch as mixing biting humour with a gripping murder-mystery tale, plus liberal use of the c-word.
The Kates interview – quick links
New season, new setting
Hitting Prime Video in 2023 and becoming a five-time AACTA Award winner and International Emmy nominee, the debut season of Deadloch followed two detectives investigating a spate of deaths, all men, in the series’ titular Tasmanian locale.
Swapping Tassie gothic for tropical outback noir, Season 2 sends the level-headed Dulcie Collins (Kate Box, Jimpa) and the high-energy Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami, Lesbian Space Princess) to the opposite end of the country, to the Northern Territory. The full six-episode new season drops on 20 March.
ScreenHub: Deadloch review – the new season of this Aussie crime comedy is even funnier
In their campervan with Dulcie’s wife Cath (Alicia Gardiner, Darby and Joan), Darwin is the duo’s maiden stop as they look into the death of Eddie’s former partner. Then a crocodile with a mouthful of human remains sparks a trip to the fictional Barra Creek, Eddie’s hometown.
‘Retrospectively, we shouldn’t have called it Deadloch,’ McCartney tells ScreenHub.
‘It was something that was always meant to be an anthology,’ she continues. ‘It’s about the body of water, though.’
McLennan adds: ‘I just thought someone at some point would say “hey, do you want to change the name?” And we’d be like “yeah, probably”.’
Eschewing formula
Deadloch’s move to the Top End was teased in the final moments of Season 1. Taking the show travelling around the country was always the plan for future instalments beyond its initial run. But when you’ve created a series, and a world and characters within it, that have struck such a chord with audiences, is it daunting to commit to such a wholesale change? Or is it an exciting new challenge? ‘Two things can be true,’ says McCartney.
‘I think it is really daunting to be like “oh, this formula really worked”. And we didn’t consider it to be a formula when we did it, but it’s like “oh, that really worked. People really resonated. They wanted to see just a town full of lesbians”,’ she continues. ‘Making fun of white, middle-class, artsy women is pretty easy for us, because that’s who we are.’
When the duo brainstormed for Season 2, the NT was their dream setting, ‘but also, at the same time we’re like “well, this worked, could we do this series again in Tasmania?”,’ explains McCartney. ‘And that was more daunting.’ The obvious questions arose. ‘How do we progress the story? How do we say something different? What do we give the actors to chew on?’
McLennan adds: ‘I think also with Season 1, I guess we had it in mind that it would just be one season here, and with these characters … The way that those characters were all written, even the really tiny, small characters, to us they had a beginning, middle and end.’
McLennan continues: ‘By the time we got to the resolution in episode eight, it did feel like we’d gone full circle with these characters and we were happy to leave them. We threw everything that we had at resolving their stories.
‘When we leave that town at the end, there’s this drone shot that pulls out and we feel like we’ve left this town – and it’s going to have a new beginning, but we don’t need to be involved. So it was like, “OK, let’s start afresh with a whole bunch of characters in a new town”.’
From tourism battles to Wolf Creek
Barra Creek might only boast one pub, but it is home to two competing croc tour operators. The Kates share a WhatsApp group chat (with fellow comedian Geraldine Hickey) filled with crocodile attacks, which came in handy.
‘It’s also not just crocodile attacks. It’s also shark attacks,’ says McCartney.
McLennan says, ‘I think snakes have featured as well. Reptiles. And every now and then, a bird of prey will be in there.’
McCartney pipes back in. ‘I’d also say that if a killer whale proves itself to be worthy, it’ll get in there, too.’
Deadloch’s second season opens aboard Don Darrell’s Best Best Jumping Croc Tours, which, as guide Amber Darrell (Nikki Britton, Mikki vs the World) is quick to inform customers, preceded their slicker rivals at Jason Wade’s Land of Crocs. (Wade, Deadloch’s wildlife park-owning, TV-starring Steve Irwin-type, is played by The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’s Luke Hemsworth.)
Also mentioned in Amber’s spiel: that a couple of Swedish backpackers who’ve gone missing from the town likely ‘got Wolf Creeked’.
A flashy all-male police team is on the case, with Dulcie’s offer of help brushed off not once but twice. As it did with its initial season, Deadloch is quick and incisive in satirising how the justice system operates – and in interrogating how it impacts anyone who isn’t a straight white man, whether as officers themselves or as members of the community that the law is meant to protect.
Calling out crime-show tropes
Season 1 resonated so strongly, and globally, not only because The Kates nailed their ‘funny Broadchurch’ goal – crafting a series that’s genuinely side-splitting and also pitch-perfect as a crime show – but because it was so astute and subversive with its humour and its statements.
Gone was the genre’s dead woman trope; within Deadloch’s narrative, male characters openly struggled with their gender being treated as women usually are.
’It felt like, yeah, we put it on screen, but everyone talks about it,’ says McCartney. ‘Every woman I know went “Yeah, exactly right”.’
McLennan adds, ‘I think it’s been interesting since then. I feel like maybe people are a little bit more aware that they perhaps need to think a bit harder before they go putting that on the screen.’
Season 2 hasn’t lost its teeth, not that anything from The Kates ever would. ‘We wanted to make something just as socially engaged and political – and so we tip in a dead croc, which is just as meaningful,’ laughs McCartney.
Fleshing out a Top End town
That deceased reptile has Dulcie and Eddie chasing the truth for both animal and human victims, a search aided by bored local journalist Leo Lee (Jean Tong), plus Season 1’s Abby Matsuda (Nina Oyama, Sunny Nights), who is now a forensics intern in the NT. Shari Sebbins (Top End Bub) plays Miki Evans, a ranger who is one of Barra Creek’s other key faces. As the slippery Frank McAllister, Steve Bisley (Human Error) is also a lively addition to the cast.
Filling Deadloch with its array of unforgettable characters – and with detail as thick as the Top End’s humidity – ranks among the delights of making the series for McLennan and McCartney.
‘That’s part of the fun with us,’ McLennan says, ‘because we like building the world. And because we’re showrunning as well, it is a holistic approach to it, that we need to live and breathe it. We need to know what’s on every street sign and what’s on every toilet door. And we need to see the world.’
As McCartney describes it, the pair ‘hyper-invest in the place’, even if bringing that spot to the screen is far from simple.
McLennan adds, ‘You would love for life to be simpler and to go “OK, well we’re not going to shoot a show in a state that we don’t live in. We’re going to make a show that’s just a little bit easier.” It’s like “Nah, nah, nah. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to go to the Northern Territory.”‘
McCartney chimes in, ‘And it’s actually going to be super late in the season, and so the rains are going to come, so we’ll have to shoot in Queensland.
‘Because also, you want to be on waterways, and you can’t be on waterways in the Northern Territory, according to our insurance. So we have to shoot all of that in Queensland as well. So you think it’s going to be easier, but then every new idea creates its own set of challenges.’
Making the most of Kate Box and Madeleine Sami
Nothing is simple about Season 2 for the often-bickering Dulcie and Eddie, either. As they each assess their choice of career, their journeys partly run in parallel – but on the personal side, the two face distinctive challenges. ‘They’re such good actors that we asked a lot of this season,’ says McCartney of Box and Sami, who remain one of television’s very best odd-couple duos.
‘I remember Boxy reading the scripts and going “I love this. It is a lonely path. This is going to be lonely for me to act this.” Because she is on such a difficult journey,’ she continues.
McLennan adds, ‘It was quite heartbreaking hearing her say that. And I was like, “Oh yeah, Dulcie is very lonely and she’s lost, and she’s trying to find her way to something”.’
As for Sami, McLennan says ‘Mads is hilarious, and Mads is so exceptional when it comes to comedy, but I don’t think we appreciated how good Mads was at doing drama.
‘Mads can really be so vulnerable and so heartbreaking. And I think that the way that Mads held Eddie’s vulnerability, that was something that we really wanted to dig into in Season 2 and really let Mads stretch.’
The Kates’ two-season trend
Watching Deadloch’s compulsively bingeable first and second seasons means wanting to spend as much time in its world and with its characters as possible. On The Katering Show and Get Krack!n, however, two seasons proved The Kates’ sweet spot.
‘It does seem like it doesn’t it?’ McCartney says. ‘It’s certainly not the first time we’ve noticed that.’
As for Deadloch breaking that two-season trend, she says ‘we certainly have other ideas. We don’t know what will happen next in terms of Deadloch.’
If the show wraps up here, it will be sorely missed, but will also go out on a high. ‘We wanted to throw everything we could conceptually at the end of this series, just to make sure, just in case we didn’t get another chance at it – because it’s never completely up to us,’ says McCartney.
As McLennan notes, that was their approach with Get Krack!n, too. ‘It was like, “We’re only going to do another season so let’s, again, throw everything at the wall with it. Treat it like we’ve only got a short time here. So let’s say what we need to say.”’
Whether The Kates believe that they’ve reached that point with Deadloch ‘depends on what day you ask us,’ they both say.
McLennan says, ‘That’s not to say that there’s not other things that need to be said, but I feel like we’ve done what we set out to do.’
‘Not me,’ jokes McCartney. ‘I want another 20 series.’
McLennan adds, ‘But it also could just be that we’re really tired.’
There might be no shortage of other crime shows, as McLennan also points out, but a series as ambitious, as probing, as perceptive and as amusing as this instant Aussie great – in both Season 1 and Season 2 – has always been in class of its own.
