Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Deadloch’ On Prime Video, Where Two Very Different Cops Investigate Murders In A Tiny Tasmanian Town

Shows like Deadloch have a fine line on which they constantly have to balance; while much of what goes on around the murder or murders at the center of the show is darkly funny, the case itself needs to be taken seriously. It’s a tone that’s darker than traditional light-drama murder mystery shows like Monk, but not so dark that it spins into moody noir.

DEADLOCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two teenage girls walk through a wooded area in the early-morning hours. They walk onto the beach and literally stumble on a naked male body, which we know because one of the girls drops a cigarette on the dead man’s penis.

The Gist: We cut to Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), a senior sergeant on the police force of the tiny Tasmanian village of Deadloch, having some early morning sex with her wife Cath York (Alicia Gardner), while their dog watches. The two of them have been in Deadloch for five years; Dulcie was a police detective in a former life, but for mental health reasons she promised Cath that she’d only do basic police work in Deadloch.

But then that body turns up on the beach. Her constables Sven (Tom Ballard), dressed in exercise gear, and Abby (Nina Oyama), not knowing exactly what to do, are already there. Abby already called for forensics, respecting Dulcie’s requested private time before 7 AM, much to Dulcie’s annoyance, given the dead body and all.

The body is of a local footie player named Trent Latham (Barry Wheeler). There doesn’t seem to be foul play, except for the fact that he’s completely naked with no personal effects around him. Dulcie calls into Commissioner Hastings (Hayden Spencer) about the case, and he tells her that all the detectives from Tasmania are tied up, so until a detective comes in from Darwin, she’s in charge.

Dulcie starts the investigation, despite the fact that she promised Cath she wouldn’t get involved in a case like that. She starts to diagram everything on a whiteboard in the station, after talking to Latham’s wife Vanessa (Katie Robertson) and son Dolph (Bryce Tollard-Williams) and his brother Gavin (Jackson Tozer), who spews conspiracy theories about his busted-up car before Dulcie can even tell him about his brother. She notes that the cameras around the harbor are all busted.

The next morning, the detective, Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami) shows up and shocks Dulcie because a) Eddie is a woman and b) she’s also rude and dismissive of everything Dulcie has done to this point. She obliterates what’s written on the whiteboard and basically concludes that Gavin killed his brother.

But even Eddie finds inconsistencies as she starts her investigation, and doesn’t feel like she’s getting answers from the forensic pathologist. But a term the pathologist mentions causes Abby to do some Googling, and it’s a pretty big detail: Trent’s tongue was cut out and was missing. When she tells Dulcie about this, she goes back to the death of the previous mayor, who was found on the beach a few years prior in much the same shape, and yes, his tongue was missing, too.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Deadloch‘s archly funny tone reminds us of Only Murders In The Building, but the setting reminds us more of Top Of The Lake.

Our Take: Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, the creators of Deadloch, have done a good job of striking a balance between the show’s darkness and its humor, because the craziness around the murders that happen in this series are more of a circumstance of the “quirky small town” aspect of the show, Dulcie’s circumstances and the conflicting personalities of Dulcie and Eddie than the cases themselves.

Yes, there are times when the humor is just dark, like the lit cigarette falling on a dead man’s penis, but McCartney and McLennan have done a good job of showing that, well, weird things happen in Deadloch, including the fact that a bloated seal named Kevin keeps beaching himself, much to the ire of the current mayor, Aleyna (Susie Youssef). But Kevin factors into the case in strange ways, not the least of which is the fact that he comes upon some of these bodies and eats parts of their faces.

But the combination of Dulcie’s earnest and somewhat inept deputies to Eddie’s desire to wrap the case up immediately and go back to Darwin, to Cath bringing Dulcie some breakfast as she interviews Vanessa, to the all-lesbian choir Cath and Dulcie are in singing “I Touch Myself,” all add up to a show that has some pretty funny scenes, most of which are borne out of the various characters’ quirks.

As the body count piles up, we will start to get into the case, and of course we will want to know why Dulcie had to move away from what we presume was a big-city detective job in Sydney to come to Deadloch. But we’re just enjoying all the nuttiness that surrounds Dulcie and these murders.

Sex and Skin: Well, there’s the nude bodies. And, like we mentioned, we first see Dulcie and Cath in the middle of some morning nookie.

Parting Shot: Another body is found, lying on the beach next to Kevin. After Cath tranquilizes the seal, Dulcie, Abby and Eddie open the man’s mouth, which we see from the inside of said mouth. Yep, his tongue is missing.

Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the cast who is not the top-billed star who shows great promise.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a scene where a procession of law enforcement vehicles escort a coroner’s vehicle with Trent’s body as it’s transported to Hobart. Then someone yells, “Hobart’s the other way!”, and they all turn around and go the other way through the town. That felt more slapsticky than most of what else is in the episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Deadloch is a show that doesn’t make fun of murder, but has a lot of fun with the people investigating the murders, along with everyone who might be a suspect, and does so in a pretty entertaining way.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.