In partnership with
Deadloch could have easily been just another small-town murder mystery. You know the type. Fog rolling in off the water. A body on the beach. Locals who swear nothing like this ever happens here, while clearly lying through their teeth. Brooding detectives dragging unresolved personal baggage from one crime scene to the next.
Instead, it gives us something far more fun and far more feral: a feminist noir comedy where the body count rises as fast as the one-liners land.
Set in the fictional, but painfully accurate, Tasmanian town of Deadloch, the series opens with the death of a local man during the town's annual Winter Feastival. It's a hyper-curated celebration of artisanal food, arts funding, and progressive branding. Think sourdough starters, sculptural fire pits, and an exhausting amount of community self-congratulation. When a corpse turns up amid the bunting and civic pride, the show immediately starts pulling at the threads holding the town together.
What follows is not just a murder investigation, but a savage takedown of small-town politics, toxic masculinity, and the brittle illusion of progress that collapses the second it's tested.
Meet Your New Favourite Detective Duo
At the centre of the chaos are two women who could not be more mismatched if they tried.
Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins is local. Controlled. Precise. Emotionally armoured to the point of near paralysis. She knows the town, knows its people, and knows exactly how much she has to swallow just to keep things moving.
Then there's Detective Eddie Redcliffe. Loud. Abrasive. Recently dumped into Deadloch from Darwin like a human grenade. Eddie has no patience for politeness, no interest in town optics, and absolutely no filter. She swears too much, drinks too much, and bulldozes straight through every social nicety Deadloch tries to impose.
Their partnership is the engine of the show. It's pure oil and water energy, fuelled by hostility, reluctant admiration, and a slow realisation that each of them sees things the other cannot. It's enemies-to-partners with bite, crackling with tension and dark humour, and refreshingly uninterested in sanding either woman down to make them palatable.
Rounding out the investigative team are Constable Abby Matsuda, who is painfully earnest and genuinely trying her best in a town determined to chew her up, and Officer Sven Alderman, who is… present. Enthusiastic. Mostly useless. A walking reminder of how little is expected of some men, even in a supposedly progressive space.
Unapologetically Queer, Unapologetically Local
What makes Deadloch cut deeper than most crime shows isn't just its plotting, but how confidently queer and aggressively Australian it is.
Dulcie's queerness is not a storyline. It's not framed as trauma, revelation, or spectacle. It simply exists. She has an ex-wife. There is history. There is tension. There is the particular ache of small-town lesbian dynamics where everyone knows your business and has an opinion about it.
The ex-wife drama alone is elite lesbian television. Quietly devastating. Petty. Intimate. Too real.
And the setting matters. This isn't a generic coastal town pretending to be anywhere. The show is soaked in Tasmania. In the clash between glossy tourism branding and long-standing local resentment. In the way "inclusive" language is adopted without any willingness to do the work behind it. In how quickly communities close ranks when their image is threatened.
Deadloch doesn't mock regional Australia from a distance. It skewers it from the inside.
Dead Men, Dark Jokes, and the Rise of Feminist Noir
Yes, men keep turning up dead. Often in ways that are grotesque, shocking, and deliberately uncomfortable. But the real target of the series is not the murders themselves. It's what they reveal.
The show takes aim at fragile masculinity, performative allyship, and the way power protects itself in small communities. The men who die are not random. They are connected by entitlement, by secrecy, by histories of violence that were ignored because confronting them would have been inconvenient.
The comedy is relentless. The jokes land hard and often, but they're never there to soften the blow. They sharpen it. Deadloch understands that humour is a weapon, especially when aimed upward. It uses absurdity to expose hypocrisy, and satire to make space for anger that feels earned rather than rhetorical.
This is noir through a feminist lens. Not stylised cool, but sweaty, furious, and deeply sceptical of institutions that claim to protect while actively failing.
Why You Need to Watch It (Immediately)
If you like your crime television polite and reassuring, Deadloch is not for you.
If, however, you want lesbian detectives with unresolved feelings, a town eating itself alive under the weight of its own branding, jokes that make you gasp and then laugh anyway, and a murder mystery that actually has something to say about gender and power, this is essential viewing.
Season 2 landed this week, and Dulcie and Eddie have left Tasmania behind. They're in the Northern Territory now, sweating through a new case in the Top End. The setting has changed completely, which is a risk worth acknowledging. So much of what made season 1 work was the specificity of place. Tasmania wasn't backdrop. It was argument. Whether the NT gets the same treatment, or becomes scenery, is the question season 2 has to answer.
Either way, you need to have seen season 1 first. It's clever. It's unhinged. It's brutally observant. And it is so much gayer, angrier, and funnier than you're expecting.
Come for the coastal noir. Stay for the feminist fury. And trust that the body count is doing narrative work.