There’s no doubt which principal character reflects the heart, soul and warped humour of Deadloch, the darkly comedic and wigged-out police procedural created and written by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan. It’s certainly not Kate Box’s senior sergeant Dulcie Collins: a generally calm and considered detective who doesn’t rush to judgment. It’s her partner Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), a thunderously loud, incongruous, decorum-breaking force of nature who doesn’t so much speak as screech, howl and bluster, as if trying to strangle the air itself, particle by particle.
As do several characters in this show: a well-paced, rambunctious, occasionally laugh-out-loud production that, like the first season, both meets and subverts genre expectations – sometimes in sly, wink-wink ways, sometimes with the grace of an elephant cannonballing into a kiddie pool. Directors Beck Cole and Gracie Otto bring verve, irreverence and a veneer of grotesquerie, echoed in Deadloch’s damp and queasy colour grading, which looks slightly off, as though the show itself is sprouting mould.
It begins in the Australian outback, with a fair-dinkum crocodile tour operator turning a hit Australian horror film into a verb: “So those missing Swedish backpackers did our boat tour and they left and they got Wolf Creeked.”
While the first season took place in chilly Tasmania, the second cranks up the humidity, relocating to the sticky Top End in the Northern Territory, with a focus on croc tourism and its various entrepreneurial oddballs.
When a dead croc is found with a human body part in its jaw, the official verdict deems it to be the remains of said missing Swedish backpacker. But Dulcie soon debunks that theory; it’s now her and Eddie’s job to discover the identity of both the dead human and the dead croc. They follow a trail of clues, of course, which arrive in the usual forms – anonymous tips, dialogue that makes characters react with variations of “uh-huh!”, and photographs that reveal more than they did at first blush.
Side characters include Abby (Nina Oyama), an amusingly sweet and naive young cop, and Leo (Jean Tong), a bored journalist for a local rag who has “written the same weekly croc attack article for months now and not one person’s noticed”. Steve Bisley also joins the cast as Eddie’s father Frank who, surprise surprise, is loud, bellicose, belligerent and grubby as all get-out, perpetually looking like somebody who has spilled their breakfast beer over their singlet.
There were times, during this second season, when I realised I didn’t really care whodunit; I just enjoyed spending time in this world and imbibing its weird, gluggy ambience. I also found myself wondering what somebody relatively new to the English language would make of the dialogue and accents: that sandpaper burr, those sunburnt vowels of the Australian accent, scorched and desiccated, a veritable assault on language itself.
A large chunk of the show’s potty-mouthed pride comes from Eddie, who is as Strayan as Strayan can be, looking like she’s always ready to flip meat with a spatula or crack open a tinnie. Her dialogue is full of “listen up cunts”, “stiff clitties”, “cut the shit”, “suck a fuck” and other sterling contributions to civil discourse. She’s a bizarre character: not quite a caricature, but perhaps in an adjacent satirical space. Two seasons in, I remain unsure whether the show might be better without her, or whether she makes up a big part of its gloriously bedevilled, wonky spirit. Either way, here’s hoping for a third.
Deadloch season two is streaming globally on Amazon Prime Video from 20 March
