In conclusion, Mrs Chutney-Fucker is a psycho

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2023 

#28 : Deadloch 

This idiosyncratic Australian murder mystery cocks a snook at the well-worn tradition of small towns being packed with murder, and serves up a true-crime satire that’s packed with inventive laughs. It’s dark, dramatic, propulsive – and very addictive.

I'd didn't hear about this at the time, but it's been showing up on my front page at Amazon Prime for a few weeks now so I was intrigued to see what it was like.

It's set in a remote Australian town which is supposed to make you think it's heading in one direction, but then they give it a large lesbian community and a hippy style arts festival, so it's populated with QUITE the set of characters.  And quite a few of them turn up dead, with the job of solving the murders falling to the clichéd odd couple partnership, one of whom is an out-of-towner to boot.  All the victims also just happen to be men and it makes some interesting points on male-on-female violence by swapping gender stereotypes for the victims and perpetrators - yes, it goes over the top but it also makes the point that maybe it needs to go over the top for some people to get it.

To be honest, it's pretty much all totally over the top, but it's got its heart in the right place and comes up with some surprisingly tender and perceptive moments.  It's also amusingly sweary and possibly the c-wordiest thing we've met so far which I totally wasn't expecting - one of the theories about the murders is that a drug ring is involved, snappily named "The Dead <c-word> Drug Ring".

On top of that, it's pretty funny, but in a surprising combination of styles of humour - it's has some moments of very dark humour, which are immediately followed by physical slapstick and then you get some extremely dry comments (often so deadpan that you miss them).  It's also engaging and keeps you guessing - which is quite important for a murder mystery because if you don't care who's being killed and why then it's just a lost cause.  And finally, it ends on a killer line which sums up the central relationship well.

Kate Box and Madeleine Sami play Dulcie and Eddie, the odd couple and they're an enjoyably odd couple who go on a nice journey together - Kate takes the plaudits for me because hers is the straighter role and she does some proper acting in it, but Madeleine dials the drama up well.   They're ably assisted by Abbie (Nina Oyama - I thought she was very good in a role which goes on quite the journey) and not so ably assisted by Sven (Tom Ballard - who is amusingly useless and goes on absolutely no journey at all).  Everyone is pretty good in it though - other stand-outs for me were Nick Simpson-Deeks as James, who is an incredible asshole (I do hope he's a really nice guy in real life), Alicia Gardner as Cath, Dulcie's wife and Pamela Rabe as Margaret, an amusingly overbearing and patronising matriach.

It's well filmed using a surprisingly large selection of locations, although some of them are a bit dark.  But when you can see it, there's some gorgeous scenery - is everywhere in Australia absolutely gorgeous? (don't answer that - I know already).  It also makes surprisingly good use of cover versions of well-known tracks - which must have cost them quite a pretty penny to use.

This completely passed me by at the time and wouldn't have been something I would have watched despite Amazon's encouragement because when you've only got a couple of sentences to describe it, it's hard to make it stand out from the "odd couple cop procedural" crowd.  But, there's a load more to it than that and it's well shot and particularly well written, making some interesting points in an amusing way.  However, if you don't like "colourful" language then you should probably just accept that this isn't going to be for you - it's impressively sweary!

#27 - The high quality bar is raised further
#30 - Well worth a watch