Review: You Can’t See the Forest Through the Lesbians
Disappointed by ‘True Detective: Night Country’? Try Prime’s properly lesbo farce ‘Deadloch’
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰½
Romance: ✰✰
Sex: ✰✰✰
Storytelling: ✰✰✰½
Performance: ✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰½
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Some light spoilers for Season 1 ahead!
Written by Ali Romig
I’m going to be frank. I’m not interested in watching True Detective: Night Country. Personally, any world in which Jodie Foster plays a dick-obsessed cop with a propensity for pointed eye-rolling is not a world in which I want to spend my time. But hey! To each their own. So where do I get my neo-noir, crime procedural fix? Well, to that I say…meet me in Deadloch! That is, a small Tasmanian island-town nestled on the southern coast of Australia with a staggeringly high Lesbian-to-fishing boat ratio.
If you haven’t heard of the Prime parody series Deadloch, don’t beat yourself up. An Australian import, the first season of the show became available to stream in June of last year and is now starting to get renewed attention thanks to a clamoring for non-dull, non-bad female-led detective shows. Created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (who fans lovingly refer to as “the Kates”), Deadloch starts off with an image we’ve seen before: two young indigenous women wander through an off-beat trail parallel to an empty beach, the lighting and music ominous. We automatically fear for these girls, who would undeniably be the victims in many other standard crime series. But when they reach the beach, one of the girls trips over something in the sand—a very dead, very naked man—and, dropping her cigarette in shock, lights his pubes on fire. Thus begins the mystery at the heart of Deadloch.
In terms of tone, I would describe Deadloch as Broadchurch meets Schitt’s Creek (with a little bit of Kath & Kim thrown in, because how could I not!). Early episodes are mostly interested in satirizing gritty cop dramas by openly mocking the “dead girl” trope that is part and parcel to them. In a grand commitment to continuing the bit, a later episode further lampoons this culturally prolific image by slowly hovering over what looks like a field of deceased, nude women—turns out, it’s simply a performance piece hosted by a group of lesbians for the annual Winter Art Festival. While the show is able to poke fun in a properly cheeky way, I think it's best once it settles into a more singular voice—allowing the mystery to ramp up in its own right, as well as letting its ensemble cast of chaotic characters shine.
Leading the charge is Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), who moved to Deadloch from Sydney just five years earlier. At the request of her anxiously-lovey-dovey wife, Cath (Alicia Gardiner), Dulcie demoted herself from Detective for reasons that aren’t brought to light until later episodes. However, it’s obvious that Dulcie sees this murder investigation as her chance to be taken seriously once again. Unfortunately for her, the commissioner has other plans and brings in a big-wig detective from Darwin to take over. Detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeline Sami) comes with no literal baggage (she literally wears the same Hawaiian shirt and flip flops until her shoes eventually disintegrate), but plenty of mysterious emotional baggage. She also brings an incredibly colorful vocabulary of unique curses to the table; my favorite for random-ness reasons is her tendency to call Deadloch, “Deadcunt''.
Dulcie and Eddie immediately butt heads, but each has her own seemingly insurmountable block when it comes to the case. For Eddie, she’s so impatient to get out of “this dick sore of a town” that she’s willing to accept the most obvious explanation, no matter how much evidence points towards something far more complicated. And for Dulcie, she is too eager to be liked and accepted by the community to truly see or consider anyone as a suspect. It isn’t until the season’s mid-point—once multiple men have been found dead—that the women realize they’ll get much further by working together.
While much of the show revolves around Dulcie and Eddie’s odd couple dynamic—a procedural staple—it truly excels as a zany portrait of a small town embroiled in a long history of cultural conflict. The mounting murder count takes place against a backdrop of ever-present, simmering tensions between the blue-collar “old sons and daughters of Deadloch” and the quickly-growing lesbian community, who’ve recently brought notoriety to the town through large art festivals and fine dining. That’s not to mention the even older clash between the area’s indigenous inhabitants and the generations of white colonizers who stole their land. One of my favorite parts of the show is watching Junior Constable Abby (Nina Oyama), who grew up in Deadloch, find her confidence while investigating the case; she eventually reminds relative outsiders Dulcie and Eddie that the town wasn’t always as “picture-perfect” as it might seem now.
This may sound like heavy fare for a comedy, but the beauty of Deadloch is how it bakes these grittier truths into its special brand of dark humor. Each community has its own eccentricities that are mined to inform the overall spirit of ridiculousness, whether it be the wife of one of the dead “old boys” singing an acapella rendition of “Lightning Crashes” at his funeral, or Cath watching a woman sit for hours and do nothing as part of something called “endurance art”. You may wonder if this ever comes across as punching down—i.e. does it become about a “man-hating lesbian” going on an all-male killing spree? Without revealing too much, I’ll say that Deadloch manages to avoid these obvious pitfalls simply through its breadth of characters. There are literally so many (named!!) lesbians on this show that it’s impossible to pigeonhole them. How many shows can say that? (Other than The L Word…and that’s another story).
Overall, the writing for this series has a refreshing, lived-in quality that I’ve been missing from a lot of comedies recently. I think it was the inclusion of diva cups and t.A.T.u’s “All the Things She Said” that clued me into the fact that, when it comes to Deadloch, the lesbian call is coming from inside the house.
Deadloch Season 1 is available to stream in its entirety on Prime. Season 2 has yet to be announced, so if this sounds at all interesting to you, watch it!
The Elephant in the Werkroom
Season 16, Episode 5:
Q’s speech about being safe was really giving me deja-ru. It seems like we get at least one of these a season now, and it’s starting to feel like an obvious bid for a storyline…I don’t know. I just don’t care so much!
What I do care about is a girl group challenge, which just happens to be one of my favorite challenges.
It feels like it has been literally FOREVER since we’ve truly had an underdog win. In my perspective, Drag Race has been playing it fairly safe in terms of who goes out when, and I think most viewers are able to accurately guess the top four well ahead of the finale. This week we saw not one, but three relative underdogs win the challenge (Nymphia is NOT an underdog)! But to be fair, how could you not win with “ASMR Lover”—arguably Ru’s best song. Still, everyone I was watching with was left to wonder…who the hell is going home?
The lip sync wasn’t incredible in either direction, but I think it’s fair to say that Q wasn’t the rightful winner…
I definitely thought that they were going to keep Amanda around for a few more weeks to really play out the Amanda/Plane Jane drama. I even thought Amanda might go out in a lip sync against Plane, for maximum effect. Sad to see her go, love to watch her leave.
Thank you for speaking out against True Detective: Night Country.
I LOVED THIS SHOW. I just finished binging it after toying with the idea for months. I got fairly obsessed, to say the least. There is maybe nothing I love more than a murder investigation. The liberal use of the word cunt was also a highlight. Adored the ensemble. Was even quite thrown by the resolution—which is RARE for me.