‘Deadloch’ Creators on How Olivia Colman Inspired Aussie Noir Comedy and How a C-Word Manifesto Convinced Producers to Keep the Swearing

Australian comedy Deadloch has been a breakout international success for Amazon Prime Video, and on Monday night, the Tasmanian-noir has the chance to be recognized as the best comedy at the 52nd International Emmy Awards in New York City.

Created by Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, a comedy writing and performing duo known as the Kates, Deadloch takes place in the eponymous sleepy Tasmanian town, where a series of murders dredges up past trauma and also lays bare the tensions within the community. The show stars Kate Box as Dulcie Collins, a former Sydney detective but now Deadloch’s permanently put-upon senior sergeant and Madeleine Sami as wild card Darwin detective Eddie Redcliffe, who is sent south to help out with the investigation.

The show, an eight-part Prime Video Australia original that is currently shooting its second season, has been a critical hit and found an international audience through strong word-of-mouth, not least for its irreverent send up of self-serious Nordic-noir/Scandi-noir shows like The Killing and The Bridge and their international imitators like the U.K.’s Broadchurch.

Deadloch has also been a streaming success, with Prime Video revealing that the first season became a breakout hit on the platform, reaching the Top 10 TV Shows in more than 165 countries and territories on Prime Video including the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Additionally, the series won five AACTA Awards earlier this year, including best acting in a comedy for Box and best screenplay in television for McLennan and McCartney. The show has also scored three nominations in the 2024 TV Week Logie Awards.

Ahead of flying off to the International Emmy Awards ceremony in New York, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to McLennan and McCartney about the breakout success of Deadloch, the inspiration Olivia Colman had behind the show, the eagerly anticipated second season and its move north to Darwin and the fabled c-word manifesto they wrote to producers at Prime Video to convince the streamer to keep all the “integral” swearing in the show.

Let’s start with the Emmys. How do you feel about Deadloch being nominated for an International Emmy?  

MCLENNAN I feel like I’m floating outside of my body a bit.

MCCARTNEY It’s almost like when you ask someone ‘do you have a concept of the universe?’, I can’t quite process it. We keep telling people that “We’re going to America” and they’re like, “Why are you going to America?” And it’s like, “Oh, there’s this thing, a meaningful award, that we’re up for and it’s not just like something career-defining. Don’t worry about it, we’ll be back on Thursday.”

So you’re still in shock about the whole thing?

MCLENNAN I think so. I think because we’re still shooting, so we’re still in the chaos of production, and there’s been so many times over the last fortnight where we’re like, “We can’t go, we can’t go to the Emmys, this is ridiculous.” But then we thought, fuck it, this doesn’t happen every day, so we just need to get on the plane.

MCCARTNEY Yeah, it’s true. There’s also something about the Northern Territory [where they are filming Deadloch season two]. It’s quite a visceral sort of [place]. You’re very in touch with your body, and all its various ways of coping with heat. To go from wandering around sweating at the base level, just being like, I need to exist much like a lizard up here. And then to go and get hair and makeup done (laughs).

MCLENNAN We were literally knee deep in mud last night on the shoot.

The reason why Deadloch got nominated for an Emmy is because the show’s traveled really well, and it’s become a hit around the world. What are your thoughts on the international success of the show?

MCCARTNEY It’s really lovely. Previous to Deadloch, we had done shows that we starred in, and it was very hard for us to sort of separate how we felt about seeing ourselves on screen to the content. And now that we have these actors within the show, we have these people creating a world and we just get to sit back from it, and watch it live, it’s a lot more calm. Personally, I find it a lot more gratifying to watch people enjoy it without having any cringe at your own performance or any sort of self-awareness of what you’ve done on screen. It’s amazing.

MCLENNAN We wanted to create something that would sit on an international level, I suppose, but we were very clear that we weren’t going to …

MCCARTNEY … change words, so that people broadly understood it. We said, “We think the specificity is going to be the thing that people will like about it, that’ll make it interesting for people.” I think also the show came about at a good time in history, post-pandemic, where people just ran out of things to watch from their own country or their own region and so they just started watching things more broadly. The streamers obviously helped everyone see stuff, content and art from around the world. So I do feel like people are just more flexible with how they can view things now or they’re allowed to be more flexible.

MCLENNAN I’m sure that there are lots of Americans that put the subtitles on.

MCCARTNEY I mean that being said, I put the subtitles on, they’re welcome to. I do that for Scottish shows … don’t tell my ancestors.

Deadloch is in English, so it’s quite accessible. But it also has a lot of swearing in it and a lot of the use of the word c***, for example. For American audiences, that’s a revelation in a way because in the U.S., the c-word is way more offensive than it is in the U.K. and in Australia. I’ve heard that created manifesto on the c-word and why should be able to use it. How did that come about?

MCLENNAN Sure, well, it was just before we started filming. Prime Video came back and basically they’d looked at the scripts and identified that there was quite a lot of swearing and, in particular, that there was quite a lot of one sensitive word …

MCCARTNEY We’re like, “What’s the sensitive word?” Because we’re Australian, and everything is flattened out. So, like what word?

MCLENNAN [Prime Video] were very much like, if you could justify this from a creative perspective, then you can keep it in the show. And so [we wrote] an essay to justify the usage.

MCCARTNEY It was about the sociocultural historical use of the word within the Australian context. It was kind of about the syncopation and the rhythm of speech. Swearing is quite integral to how we punctuate.

MCLENNAN I think that the crux of the essay was basically if you try to make us change this, then “you’re racist” (laughs). This is racism. This is part of our cultural identity!

MCCARTNEY [We were saying] that once you get into the rhythm of it, you won’t notice it. Don’t worry about it.

I’m fascinated by this manifesto. Was it actually like an academic essay with footnotes and everything?

MCCARTNEY I mean, there wasn’t a bibliography. We didn’t go across [to a library] and have a look at any microfiche or anything. Yeah, microfiche, that’s how old I am. Everyone had a hand in kind of creating the bones of it and what we wanted to say within it. And then Ben Chessell [one of the Deadloch season one directors], he ended up penning the thing. I knew him at university and we both did arts degrees. He absolutely leaned into the academic language.

MCLENNAN I feel like he wrote it with a tweed jacket on, with a couple of glasses of red wine …

MCCARTNEY … recruited a Labrador to come sit next to him. We thought we were going to put it up in the public domain for people to read, but I don’t know what’s happened to it.

I’d love to read it! So let’s talk about the show itself. What were the inspirations behind Deadloch?

MCCARTNEY It started when we had children at roughly the same time, not together of course, but it was just more economical and sort of easier time scheduling-wise if we had children in quick succession to each other. We were both kind of doing those late nights with the baby, 3 a.m. slots where you just sit there and you feel like the only person in the world. And you’re like, “Am I, is it, is it just me? Am I just stardust?” But we were watching a lot of like crime dramas during that time, for some reason, the thing that we were watching that Scandi-noir type crime dramas. My mum had told me to watch Broadchurch, and then I told McClennan to watch it.

MCLENNAN I thought it was a comedy because I’d only ever known Olivia Colman as a comedy actor. We’re both comedy nerds, so I was like, cool, I’m going to watch this comedy show and realized pretty quickly that it was not a comedy.

MCCARTNEY But [Olivia Colman] is also very funny [in Broadchurch], so there were bits in it where there was the opportunity for levity. She was so funny and you could see that if you just slightly tweaked the show, it kept all the suspense, kept the intrigue, kept the stakes that just allowed their space to be comedy, then it would be a really interesting mix. Then we started playing with it. We started working on it, and at first it really was like a half-hour sitcom that was much more of a parody. As this was happening at the same time we were doing more TV and we learned a bit more about how to write narrative and our aspirations just got bigger. We wanted to say more, so we decided to go for gold and see if we can pull off this sort of this tonal tightrope walk.

MCLENNAN It was just around the same time that Killing Eve had just been released and you know that 45-minute time slot, that gives you a little bit more time and grace just to be able to sit in something that would be visually quite beautiful and arresting to watch as well. Because quite often with comedy, you do sometimes sacrifice the aesthetic because you’re on a 30-minute time slot. We’d just done a parody of a breakfast television show [called The Katering Show]. We’ve done two seasons of that, which is just the ugliest world — multi-cam, harsh lights, hot orange. It was just such an ugly world, and we were like right we want non-ugly subject matters. We want something beautiful with blues and greens that it is nice to watch.

MCCARTNEY Also, it’s just a nice holiday for us. We just love Tasmania.

So is that why you chose Tasmania as a location because it’s beautiful?

MCCARTNEY There is a concept of “Tassie-noir” here. There’s a lot of Australian gothic stuff that is set down in Tasmania, and it fits to all the sort of landscapes within it. There are so many different environments within Australia, but that one matches that Scandi-noir in tone. We want people to feel like they understand the world [we’ve created] coming into it, that they know the sort of show that they’re watching.

Deadloch is quite incredible for the number of themes and underlying issues you pack in. Issues like gentrification, the rights of First Nation peoples, the treatment and abuse of women, LGBT themes. What was the thinking behind putting in so much into ostensibly a comedy show?

MCLENNAN We always knew that we were going to use the mechanism of a town to speak to [lots of issues]. The town is Australia. There was a writer who we worked with very early on, and she described Tasmania as being like a stock cube, and how lots of issues that we face as a society are all concentrated in this one island and that was really a foundational touchstone for us of what this show is. Even now with season two, we’re going to another town, but we’re still using a town to speak to all of these issues. We wrote the show, but then when we got to Tasmania and we were in pre-production, we did a lot of rewrites because we felt like we really wanted to depict something that was indicative of where we were shooting. Tasmania has really gone through this process of gentrification and so it felt like we needed to speak to that as well. And also there’s great comedy in that too, which is an end point for us because of the work that we’d done previously, where we’ve done a lot of social satire. That was in our wheelhouse.

MCCARTNEY We tend to find a genre and then use that genre as an entry point for people, that we can then talk about the stuff that we want to talk about. And it was really lovely to have this cast of characters. Because we’re two white ladies who are both 44, who grew up within the same state, we can only represent so much, we only have so many stories within us. So once you open that world up, everyone comes to the playing field with their own story. You just get the opportunity to talk about so much more.

Season two of Deadloch is moving to Darwin, why did you choose the city? And what was it like to shoot in Darwin?

MCLENNAN We always knew that if we got a second season that we were always going to go to the Top End [in the Northern Territory] and we originally did have some scenes that were in the pilot in the very, very early stages of the pilot we did have sort of Eddie, like in-situ up in the Top End. So we always knew that that was kind of where we were headed. Going from season 1 to season 2, we really did want to take the audience to a completely new environment, which we felt like we said what we needed to say in Deadloch Tasmania, and so it’s time to move on and tell a new story. And then the Top End is incredibly beautiful. We love the idea of Dulcie [played by Box] being a real fish out of water in that environment and what that would do for her comedically and just her being off kilter and uncomfortable and lost really. It’s so rich in terms of what it gives us for the story because there is like a sense up there that it is still really isolated and it’s a lot harder to get to for most Australians. It is a very, very famous part of our country because of Crocodile Dundee.

MCCARTNEY [The Northern Territory] speaks a lot to these worldwide conceptions of Australia that started in the late ’70s, early ’80s that are very much sort of driven by Crocodile Dundee and that frontier man, white colonizer type. It’s very rich for us in terms of talking about Australian society.

MCLENNAN We wanted to talk a lot about masculinity with the second season as well as the police. It’s really fertile ground up there and just having a different feel as well. It plays into different ideas, like using equatorial crime dramas, Southeast Asian crime dramas. Also [finding out] what tropical gothic looks like has been a really fun, that kind of Miami Vice Floridian type. It’s been really fun to apply it to an Australian context. [Australian] people, they know the outback, but I don’t know if they necessarily get as much of the tropics from our media.

Australian television comedy seems to be having a moment, with shows like The Letdown, Colin From Accounts, The Office and Fisk finding audiences round the world. How do you feel about that? And is it something that’s talked about in the comedy community back home?

MCCARTNEY I can’t speak to what the community thinks. I’m at home just with cats. I think again it’s been that post-pandemic thing and then also the arrival of streamers into Australia and their attitude towards creators has meant that it’s a lot more creative focused, and there are just more opportunities. That’s meant people who have really strong voices have been given the freedom to create content for the first time.

MCLENNAN Someone like Kitty Flanagan, for example, doing Fisk or Colin From Accounts, for all of the performers it does feel like this has been decades in the making, just being able to write something that speaks to their experience, but it is also very clear in terms of what their tone is as well. I think it’s very uncompromising, I suppose, and like [McCartney] said, these creators are being given [opportunities]. There’s a lot of trust that’s being placed in them, and I think that’s great. I think to a certain extent, we’ve had a little bit of a shift in the people that are commissioning the comedies. People are getting out of the creator’s way a little bit.

MCCARTNEY There’s no more of that ‘cultural cringe‘ stuff, we [do not have to] have that conversation. We’ve been in the industry for 24 years at this point, [and now we’re] not having to apologize for being Australian, not having to buff out the bits that make content Australian. [There’s been] such a shift in the execs and the people who are commissioning editors.

Do you think in the past these Australian shows would have just been remade rather than the originals given a platform to find an audience?

MCCARTNEY That’s a really interesting question. I’m not sure, it feels like every now and then there’s a remake of something Australian, but it does feel like [now] it’s, “Well, why would you remake it if it’s already there and it’s working and the audience is finding it?” I read [something] 15 years ago, where they were talking about the rise of the internet, and how the media’s thinking that there’s never going to be massive blockbuster shows again or that they’re gonna be few and far between, that there’s going be, instead, this sea of slightly smaller productions that each have their audience, and I feel like that’s been really helpful for Australian creators.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.