Deadloch season two: Crocs, weirdos and a lot of C-bombs

Nina Oyama never went anywhere on the Deadloch set without her gigantic water bottle.

When she arrived in the Northern Territory to shoot the second season of the uproariously funny and chaotic Deadloch, she had the bejesus scared out of her by the health and safety team.

Yes, there were the crocodiles lurking everywhere in the Top End was such a risk that all the water and water-adjacent scenes were shot in Queensland, as dictated by the insurance company.

But no, the OH&S people were deadly serious about something as mundane as it can be fatal: dehydration and heat exhaustion. For every 30 minutes, you’re supposed to drink 250ml.

“I do two of these a day,” Oyama said, pointing to her bottle, covered in a curated collection of stickers from the House of Darwin. “Apparently that’s still not enough.”

It was really, really hot up there.

“We’re filthy, we’re covered in dirt,” actor Kate Box said with the air of someone resigned to her state, not even trying to fight it. If you’re outside and the sun is out, the heat is inescapable.

The cast and crew were in the town of Batchelor, population 396 at the last census, an hour south of Darwin and on the edge of Litchfield National Park. Its Rum Jungle Tavern had been transformed into the Barra Creek pub, the locus of activity and drama for Deadloch’s fictional town.

The carpark and the road adjacent to the pub has become a pseudo-backlot for the production, which had 93 cubic metres of red dirt brought in on four semi-trailers to cover all the ground in sight.

The red dirt adds to the sense of repressive heat, but it’s also movie magic, evoking an idea of the Australian outback in the minds of Deadloch’s international audiences as well as, let’s be honest, local city slickers.

Café dwellers in the back lanes of Melbourne or beachside in Sydney also have an idea of the outback that has mostly been imprinted on them by movies, TV shows and advertising campaigns.

But the Top End is more than red dirt, even though it looks great on screen. You go a few kilometres in any direction from Batchelor and the landscape and colours can be vastly different – waterfalls and tropics, deserts, rivers and beaches.

It’s a far cry from the frosty and dark forests of Tasmania, where Deadloch set its first season.

The Australian comedy-mystery returns for its second season this week, now transported to the NT, the home of Eddie (Madeleine Sami), the bombastic, brash and chaotic detective who was the out-of-towner in its lauded first instalment.

The kineticism of the place explains a lot about Eddie, who wants to understand how her former partner died, and is then caught in a wide-ranging plot which encompasses missing crocodiles, floating body parts, two vanished Swedish backpackers and the dynastic battles of a croc tours family.

It’s a fresh environment for Dulcie (Box), Eddie’s reluctant new partner, who with her wife Cath (Alicia Gardner) has traipsed up to Barra Creek in their caravan. Before long, young cop Abby (Oyama) has joined them, now a forensics expert being bullied by two interns and a dog.

The four continuing characters rush headlong into a slate of Deadloch newbies, a cornucopia of big personalities and quirky oddballs.

There’s Shari Sebbens, who plays Eddie’s old mate and is now a local ranger trying to protect the crocs from those who would exploit them, Jean Tong as a monotone journalist, Steve Bisley as Eddie’s shaggy dad, Nikki Britton as Amber, the daughter of the Darrells croc tour family, and Luke Hemsworth as Jason Wade, a slick and dismissive media personality who fronts a croc-centric theme park and TV show.

These characters might seem out there, as if they could only exist on a TV show with a high-frequency C-bomb count, but Sami said there are plenty of them out in the wild, just walking down the street.

“You don’t need to drive around the NT very long to see some very eccentric personalities,” she explained. “I think there’s a feeling up here like, ‘Yeah, we f—king live among the crocs’. There was the type of person that would move here to just be like, ‘Come on, let’s f—king go!’.

“The first week we were here, I walked and saw thousands of images that the Kates had written, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s just Darwin’. It’s wasn’t even some weird thing the Kates thought to pop in, it’s totally this place.”

“The Kates” are Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, who had established their brand of off-kilter and winning comedy with The Katering Show and Get Krack!n before they created Deadloch in 2023.

The pair knew if they got a second season, it would be in the NT, and had even filmed a tease at the end of that first season which signalled Eddie and Dulcie’s next case.

“We went on this research trip in between seasons, before we even got the green light, and from the moment we got off the plane, every single moment has gone into season two,” McCartney said.

These episodes are a distillation of all the strange people and scenarios, and just the irrepressible and unapologetic spirit of the NT the Kates have experienced

“We went on like three croc tours in one day, we went out to this ridiculous pub, and we met this crocodile in a cage out the back,” McCartney continued. “We met these very, very funny locals who were just so mysterious, and they were very closed off and didn’t want to tell us anything about their lives, but they were cracking these jokes.

“All of this stuff has fed into the show, and it was basically how much stuff can we get in there.”

The tone of Deadloch’s second season is still familiar, but with the shorter episode count – six instead of eight – the pandemonium feels more condensed and therefore heightened.

Then you add in the crocs, and it’s dialled up to 11. McCartney has a photo of her that McLennan took – she’s swimming beneath a waterfall in Litchfield, smiling and giving a thumbs up to the camera.

“A week later, they pulled a crocodile out of that waterfall, and there had been no rain in between (which meant) that crocodile was there when I was in the water!” she said.

McLennan added, “Crocs have not evolved since before the dinosaurs, they came up with that design and it was perfect.”

But the season is a love letter to the creature.

“We wanted to show that the landscape and the environment and the creatures will win, we can’t conquer them,” McCartney said. “It’s a very white perspective to think you can tame this place.

“We looked at this place from a historical perspective, and obviously Indigenous people have lived there for tens of thousands of years, and then you have this very recent history of white people being there.

“We were really interested in the way that white men wanted to conquer the landscape, and that is something that is still very prevalent today. You see these TV shows that are still around men trying to dominate the landscape, to dominate the wildlife, of overtaking and winning.”

If the first season of Deadloch has running through it a thread of the evil that men do, that DNA is still part of this new batch.

McCartney and McLennan cited the cinematic legacy of the likes of Crocodile Dundee, Wake in Fright and Wolf Creek in thinking about how Australia has been presented to the world, and how Australian masculinity interacts with those spaces.

“Looking at how the Australian male has been presented, and by association, the stereotype of the larrikin,” McCartney said.

“It’s taking those images that an international audience might connect with Australia, and dissecting that and tearing it apart, scrubbing beneath the surface. It was quite appealing to us to do something like that so (that audiences) can grab hold of something, and then take them on a deeper journey.

“Knowing that there was an international audience, we could speak to these very big themes affecting our country in a broad way.”

All while still dropping the C-bomb every few lines of dialogue.

Deadloch season two is streaming on Prime Video from March 20

The writer travelled to the Northern Territory as a guest of Prime Video