How Madeleine Sami got her Super City groove back
Her eccentric detective in Deadloch steals every scene. Plus, Platonic is a stunner, Succession's successor is a shocker, and everything you need for your weekend.
Kia ora! I appreciated everyone’s feedback after my Couples Therapy NZ review. Some said they found it too intense. Others admitted they were like me, taking their time and pacing themselves. There were more who wondered if the show’s couples were being looked after. According to my colleague Alex Casey, extra steps have been taken to protect the cast. They’re not doing interviews. You won’t hear them joking around on The Edge Breakfast. And producers are checking in with them. That’s a good thing. After the bravery they’ve shown, you’d hope they’re being looked after every step of the way.
-Chris Schulz, senior writer, The Spinoff
Madeleine Sami is the twist in this small-town Aussie murder-mystery
The skies are overcast, and a grey mist hangs over everything. The music is eerie, choral voices chiming over dull basslines. “Why wasn’t I alerted to this earlier?” asks senior sergeant Dulcie Collins. She’s standing over the sandy corpse of a man washed up on a beach in the fictional Australian town of Deadloch. A junior police officer admits she didn’t call because she didn’t want to interrupt Collins’ evening. “A dead body trumps work-life balance,” she spits back.
Judging by the beginning of Deadloch, Prime Video’s latest Australian-produced show, viewers are being prepared for yet another bleak police procedural. The tried-and-true clichés are present and correct: this small town is full of characters, everybody knows everybody else’s business and their friendly smiles bely a darkness bubbling beneath the surface.
Five minutes in, we have a murder mystery on our hands, and everyone – including a giant feral seal perched on a nearby foot bridge – is a suspect.
Kate Box, a familiar screen presence in Australia, plays senior sergeant Collins as stern and straight-faced – she’d fit right in on Happy Valley, Broadchurch or Top of the Lake. Yet Deadloch is not that type of story, and nor is it trying to be. “I’m running the show … and I need a Coke,” declares detective Eddie Redcliffe. She’s stormed into Collins’ urgent police meeting like a hurricane, yelling, “Gidday!”, sneezing, then muttering, “Fuck me, it’s colder than a witches’ tit!”
Redcliffe’s Hawaiian shirt, jandals and laid back attitude mean she stands out in a room full of uniformed police. They don’t even think she works there. Indeed, she does: Redcliffe, played by our own Madeleine Sami, is – here comes another cliche – the big city detective who’s arrived to scour this small town and crack the case. “Alright, dead man in dead lake,” she says, clearing a whiteboard, then realising her mistake. She doesn’t care. “Deadloch? Whatever. Let’s get this over with. How long has shrivelled dick been dead for?”
Welcome back, Madeleine Sami. It’s been a while since we’ve seen the local comedy veteran really going for it. We know she can: across two seasons of her unrepentantly inappropriate 2011 cult comedy caper Super City, she played every single character: a homeless mother, a gym junkie, an inappropriate WINZ staffer, an immigrant taxi driver, and infamous party-girl Pasha. But the last time we really saw her doing her thing was in 2020, when she appeared in the first season of Taskmaster NZ donning yellow gloves to make a caravan disappear.
In Deadloch, Sami’s channelling that Super City kind of energy. Her Detective Redcliffe is there to be the agent of chaos, to upend every scene she’s in. She’s the comedy foil, and you can tell she’s loving every second of it. Instead of the staid police procedural Deadloch could have become, Sami’s performance elevates it to another level. It still hits all those mystery show tropes. If you want a whodunnit, Deadloch delivers. But Sami’s wired, unhinged energy also helps gently mock the very familiar genre the show’s working within.
This could have gone sideways so easily. The show’s creators, Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, have admitted they thought up the concept while stuck at home with newborns while bingeing Scandi-noir shows. “We started to think, ‘What if you took a show like Broadchurch, tonally, and then just dialled up the comedy – how would that work?’” McLennan told the Sydney Morning Herald.
It’s a fine line to tread, appealing to fans of mysteries and comedies at the same time. Don’t take it far enough and the jokes fall flat. Go too far the other way and you become American Vandal. All of that hinges on Sami, and she probably couldn’t have pulled this off without the experience she had on Super City. “It’s probably one of my favourite characters I’ve ever played,” she told The Fold. “She’s like nothing like you’ve ever seen a woman do on screen before – get to be that really brash, aggressive … unlikeable, rough gal.”
Lol? I did, many times. Sami steals many scenes. At one point, she sings the lyrics to Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’ to rev up her fellow officers, then tells them, “Fly, little piggies”. At another, she’s got a foot up on the desk, mimicking masturbation as a suggestion for what may have happened to the victim. “What do you think, Sarge?” she says. “Is it a tug gone wrong?”
It makes for a rude, crude palate cleanser. At one point, the murder case is thwarted when footage of the murder is interrupted by copulating seagulls. “I’m not going to be here long enough to rub titties with you,” declares Redcliffe at another. During the excellent pilot, there’s a full choir rendition of Divinyls’ raunchy hit ‘I Touch Myself’ complete with an “orgasm breakdown”. Yes, Deadloch is that kind of show.
If you’re burnt out by the tense finales for Succession and Barry (who isn’t?), brutalised by Dead Ringers or Couples Therapy NZ, or feeling savaged by the apocalyptic vibes of The Last of Us or Sweet Tooth, Deadloch is a nice, silly, fun, easy watch, with another brilliantly ridiculous performance by Madeleine Sami at the centre of it. You won’t be troubled by it, but you also won’t be disappointed. In the middle of 2023, just as winter kicks in, that might be the sweet spot everyone needs.
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Why you need to see: Platonic
Every now and then you just need a really easy, fun comedy. Apple TV+ is increasingly becoming the home for shows like this (see also: Ted Lasso and Shrinking). Platonic is the streamer’s latest effort, and three episodes in, it’s just what I need in my life. Starring the effortlessly likeable pairing of Seth Rogan and Rose Byrne, Platonic is a “will they won’t they” that appears to answer that question in the title: they won’t. It’s all about the importance of friendship and the fact that, sometimes, those in our lives don’t understand how we can stay mates with someone. Using the Judd Apatow rom-com formula without any of the rom (at least so far), it makes for an easy-watching comedy that’s laugh out loud funny. /Stewart Sowman-Lund
Why you need to see: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
I have seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse more times than any other film in recent memory. Released in 2018, it caught the imagination of my then-seven-year-old son who would watch it often, then blast “What’s Up Danger” from his bedroom. The sequel is bigger, bolder and brasher. It’s a beautifully animated piece of art – the colours pop like a pop-art graphic novel on acid. It has a very good villain, some very nice additions to the Spider-people cast, a couple of cameos and some very funny lines. But there’s so much content here that by the end of its 140-minute runtime, I felt just a little relieved when the, “To be continued” sign popped up. /Chris Schulz
Here’s all the new stuff you can watch right now
It’s a long weekend for most, so you might be keen to try out some new shows. Whatever you do, don’t start with HBO’s Succession successor The Idol (Neon). Billed as an over-sexed journey into the world of ultra-pop stardom from the minds of Euphoria’s Sam Levinson and pop icon The Weeknd, critics say it categorically does not live up to the hype. “Prosaic,” said Vanity Fair, “punishing,” declared Paste, “skin-crawling,” quipped Rolling Stone. “Even the music is dreadful,” said The Telegraph. With just a 27% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it might pay to avoid this one.
Elsewhere, Amazon Prime is unveiling a suite of new content just in time for the weekend, including the excellent Deadloch, a comedy cop show starring our own Madeleine Sami, Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, about a hardcore Christian collective in America (“Damning,” said Jezebel), and Medellin, a French drug adventure set in Columbia. Netflix has the third season of cult sketch comedy fave I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.
This weekend’s big new release is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the follow-up to the legitimately great animated film Into the Spider-Verse from 2018. I’ve watched this a heap of times, and my son sent the entire soundtrack into my most-played lists. Elsewhere, Bank of Dave is based on a true story film about a Brit who opens his own bank, while The Boogeyman is a Stephen King adaptation that’s getting great reviews “Hits hard,” declared AV Club. All are in theatres now.
* For more new releases, check out Sam Brooks’ weekly guide, New to Streaming.
On The Spinoff now: Madeleine Sami on Deadloch and deadlines
She seems to have mastered acting, writing and directing after two decades creating film and TV, but what's next for Madeleine Sami? She joins Duncan Greive to talk about the institutions which made her and her two new original series airing in June.
Everything you need to know…
Still recovering from that Succession finale? We’ve put together our favourite ever Succession scenes and Toby Manhire has 19 suggestions for spinoff shows (at least one of which, ‘Shit Show at the Fuck Factory,’ I would definitely watch).
Did you love Lost? Me too, but a new book excerpt published by Vanity Fair details a toxic and racist behind-the-scenes culture. Showrunner Damon Lindelof talks openly in the piece, admits to problems and says: “I failed.”
As Hollywood’s writers strike enters its fourth week, impacting TV creation around the world, YouTube crosses picket lines every day, argues Duncan Greive.
Paula Harris bemoans that there’s nothing good to watch on linear TV any more.
Alex Casey is transfixed by Mike Puru’s hectic new live shopping show.
I really enjoyed this interview on TV podcast The Town with the director and star of Jury Duty (Prime Video, go watch!) about how it could have all gone so wrong.
Bad news, Euphoria fans: Season three isn’t coming until 2025.
Finally, here’s your weekly trailer wrap-up: Burden of Proof is an HBO doco about a missing woman, Full Circle is Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller, Black Mirror’s sixth season looks awesome, Idris Elba stars in Hijack about a plane takeover, here’s the trailer for the Justified reboot City Primeval, here’s Jack Ryan’s final season, Tilda Swinton is as eccentric as ever in A24’s Problemista, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem looks, like, cowabunga, dude.
That’s it for Rec Room for this week. If you liked what you read, why not share Rec Room with your friends and whānau.
