Deadloch: “We like the occasional gut punch”

New local series Deadloch premieres this week on Prime Video.

The Tasmanian town of ‘Deadloch‘, a once sleepy seaside hamlet, is left reeling when a local man turns up dead on the beach. Two female detectives are thrown together to solve the case: fastidious local senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) and a rough-as-guts blow-in from Darwin, senior investigator Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami) along with their overeager junior constable Abby (Nina Oyama).

Ahead of production, TV Tonight spoke with creators, writers and executive producers, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (Get Krack!n, The Katering Show), who explained the series gestation over the past few years.

Kate McClennan: “We pitched it in 2019 and we did a development period (in 2020) because it was very clear that we weren’t going to be shooting because of the pandemic. It gave us some time to kind of dig into the idea and really solidify it.”

Kate McCartney: “During the development we wrote a broad overview of the of the series and then wrote the pilot. We’d done different incarnations of that for quite a few years before it was attached to Amazon.”

The series is a murder comedy, but the duo didn’t invest a lot of research time into others in the genre.

McCartney: “We haven’t really watched too many things that have the same intersection… Barry‘s sort of a kind of a nice creative with the look and feel of it. We watched a lot of crime stuff. But it’s all been quite serious, because we’re really interested in giving it the spine of a real crime drama and just making sure it’s as funny as we can possibly make, it over the top. It’s like decorating it with jokes, but making sure the building itself is thrilling and mysterious. All those sorts of things that you would expect from a crime drama. It’s been really fun to weave the two things together.”

McLennan: “It’s very unique, though. I don’t think there’s been anything made quite like it certainly in this country.”

McCartney: “A big call from Kate McLennan!”

McLennan: “We have the room to really get into it. We’re writing lots of very fun scenes. It’s quite a treat.”

McCartney: “It’s also an hour, not a half hour sitcom. Again, we’re trying to really emulate the structure of a high quality crime drama with the same narrative arcs. We want you to be really invested in the characters as well.”

McLennan: “We do invest a lot in the jokes, but then also, we want to really give it emotion as well. It does get quite intense and obviously deals with some very serious subject matter as well throughout. So we try and gut punch the audience a little bit as well.”

McCartney: “We like the occasional gut punch. We want you to laugh and then occasionally, we’ll punch up.”

L-R: Kate Box, Kate McClennan, Kate McCartney, Madeleine Sami.

McLennan: “I grew up in country Victoria, so this is a play on that… it’s a coastal town, but I’m also very much using the idea of it being on the Tasmanian food trail. It’s a Huon Valley-esque backdrop, so it will look beautiful.”

McCartney: “I just Googled all the places that The Kettering Incident was shot in and I’m just like, ‘add another camera filter to the top of that.'”

Also featuring are Tom Ballard, Alicia Gardiner, Susie Youssef, Pamela Rabe, Kris McQuade, Duncan Fellows, Harvey Zielinski, Shaun Martindale, Katie Robertson, Nick Simpson-Deek, Mia Morrissey, Leonie Whyman, Mick Davies, Holly Austin, Kartanya Maynard, and Naarah.

McCartney: “Get Krack!n allowed us to have so many people in it and they were all so funny. It’s a big cast, but we could cast it 10 times over.”

The eight-part series was shot in and around Hobart, Tasmania in 2022 with episodes directed by Ben Chessell (The Great, Giri/Haji), Gracie Otto (The Moth Effect, Seriously Red), and Beck Cole (Black Comedy, Wentworth), with Andy Walker (Rosehaven, The Kettering Incident) producing.

McCartney: “We love Andy Walker. We’ve been trying to work with him for a number of years. … he’s a delight and he attracts really lovely people. We always want people to have a lovely time.”

“I mean, we can have a terrible time. We can be stressed and everything bu we want everyone else to have a nice time.”

Friday June 2 on Prime Video.

Amended.