Good Cop Bad Cop’s Leighton Meester and Luke Cook on their cosy crime comedy

Australian actor Luke Cook may have been expected to play host to his Good Cop Bad Cop American castmates but the truth is, it’s a big country and the Sydney-born actor hadn’t been to the Gold Coast since he was 10 years old.

It was Leighton Meester who took him to a café in Mermaid Beach, which Cook still remembers for its ham and cheese croissants. The pair had never met before but they had lunch, read lines on the beach and hung out for half a day.

That was all that was needed to establish their sometimes prickly but mostly loving onscreen relationship as brother and sister.

Meester plays Lou Hickman, a senior detective in a small town called Eden Vale, working under her father Hank (Clancy Brown), the police chief. Desperate for help, she finally gets her wish for another investigator but is shocked to discover her dad has hired her brother, the fastidious Henry.

Henry is a big brain with an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything and a tendency to rub people the wrong way, while Lou is more a “kill them with kindness” cop. They should clash but there is an alchemy in their difference.

Cook, who had memorably played Satan on The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, joked that he and Meester “just immediately started bickering with each other” thanks to a combination of the writing and the fact they hit it off off-screen.

While he couldn’t point to any local landmarks or recommendations and that it was she who told him about beaches he’d never even heard of, he was more a cultural guide, telling her, “Maybe be ready for lots of people to say the C-word more than you’ve ever heard it before”.

Because of Cook’s warnings, Meester, best known for her roles on Gossip Girl and Single Parents, wasn’t so shocked by Australians’ looseness with swearing. But she did have to get used to another aspect of our vernacular.

“It’s the shortening of everything,” she told The Nightly. “The shortening of every single word. Where were we? Oh, Broadbeach, so that’s like Broady. We were in Tambo, which is Mount Tambourine. Just everything.”

Apart from Meester and Brown, most of the talent was local, so it’s a lot of Australians putting on a Yankee drawl, including Devon Terrell, Scott Lee, William McKenna, Grace Chow, Lincoln Lewis and Phillippa Northeast, plus Blazey Best, but she’s doing a Russian accent.

There are also single-episode pop-ins from the likes of Dan Ilic, Matthew Backer, Debra Lawrence, Mark Best, Sam Delich, Felix Cameron and Rhys Muldoon. But perhaps the most anticipated guest star is Adam Brody, of The OC and Nobody Wants This fame and also Meester’s husband.

The whole family had moved out to Queensland for the months-long shoot so it seemed like a bit of fun to slot Brody in. Why not? He was already here.

“It felt like a last minute (decision) even though it was a seed that we planted way early on. I knew that Adam and my family was going to be out there for the whole series and I just thought, ‘There’s probably some character in here that is just weird enough for him to play’.

“And, by god, we found it. With every script, we’d take a look and go, ‘Well, is there anything he could do?’ and there ended up being a doctor-turned-vet in a travelling rodeo situation from one of the episodes. It’s as weird as it sounds, and he was really fun to play with.”

Weird and quirky is the vibe. Good Cop Bad Cop is a mystery-of-the-week series in which the fictional small town’s residents get caught up in something odd.

There’s a plot involving an amateur film crew trying to make a “found footage” movie of a local folk tale, a story involving the high school football star and another with a trio of tech bros and some deadly mushrooms.

There are shades of shows such as Psych, Northern Exposure, Poker Face and Deadloch, where the characters are key and the stories are a bonus.

The other series that’s name-checked in Good Cop Bad Cop is Twin Peaks, which one TV-obsessed character says she was looking for when she came upon Eden Vale.

While not supernatural or surrealist like Twin Peaks, there’s a thread between the two.

“I find so much comfort in Twin Peaks, it’s one of my happy places,” Meester said. “It’s got such a sense place.”

Meester said she could see what the filmmakers were trying to achieve, even from the pilot.

“It’s a Pacific Northwest town, and there’s a police department with some quirky people who are the cops that work there, and then there’s the residents, the crime of the season and there are the individual episode crimes.

“It just felt like there was a little nod to it here and there. Some were blatant. I just enjoyed that so much, taking a little piece that cosy, nostalgic feeling of Twin Peaks.”

Cook added that it was a genre that appeals to audiences, “It’s nice to come back to this kind of comedy where it’s relaxed. It’s not trying to blindside you with any kind of traumatic thing or preach to you. It’s just light and enjoyable.”

Good Cop Bad Cop is on Stan from February 20