We invoked Shakespeare: Kates McLennan and McCartney on explaining Australian swearing to Amaz

Publish date: 2024-04-24
Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney called their new show Deadloch ‘Funny Broadchurch – but without the paedophilia; it’s very hard to put a funny spin on that’. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The GuardianKate McLennan and Kate McCartney called their new show Deadloch ‘Funny Broadchurch – but without the paedophilia; it’s very hard to put a funny spin on that’. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
Australian televisionInterview

‘We invoked Shakespeare’: Kates McLennan and McCartney on explaining Australian swearing to Amazon

The Australian best friend writing duo talk about making their ‘feminist noir comedy’ Deadloch for Amazon, gentrification in Tasmania and going ‘full bridge troll’ after years on TV

“Cunt” is not a word that Americans bandy about lightly. So when Amazon gave the green light to Australian comedy writers Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney to start work on their “feminist noir comedy” series Deadloch, it was clear that they would have to convince the US media giant on a key part of the Australian vernacular.

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It led to a document that McLennan and McCartney call “The Cunt Manifesto”.

“It was quite controversial,” says McCartney. “It was a real talking point. We all had a hand in creating this document that had footnotes and citations, where we explained the Australian cultural context for using ‘cunt’ and how borderline innocuous it can be. We explained how it fit in the rhythm of our writing. We invoked Shakespeare. And Amazon read it and said, ‘that makes sense’.”

McLennan, 43, and McCartney, 42, seemingly arrived out of nowhere when the Katering Show, a vicious parody of cooking YouTubers, took off online in 2015. Each episode, now watched by millions around the world, revealed the slightly unhinged, savage nature of their humour, as the pair brightly delivered lines like, “Fun fact: beetroots are potatoes filled with blood!” or as McLennan used her (real) placenta to cook what she called a “plasagna”.

McLennan and McCartney were suddenly the most electrifying writing duo since, well, Lennon and McCartney.

The Thermomix episode of the Katering Show.

Their follow-up show Get Krack!n, which aired on the ABC, skewered the bright, hyper-caffeinated world of breakfast television: in the style of Australian morning mainstays Mel and Kochie, McLennan and McCartney flit between topics like assisted suicide and sarongs, their bright smiles becoming rictus as they introduce yet another stupid segment.

Under the gags, though, Get Krack!n thrummed with a ferocious anger about how women are treated on TV, which is a theme also threaded through their new show Deadloch, which premieres around the world next week.

The crime drama comedy follows homicide detective Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) as she tries to solve a series of murders in her small Tasmanian town. All of the victims are male, a detail that immediately sets it apart. “This sort of thing, you sort of presume it’s a woman,” the (male) police commissioner says offhandedly of the murder case, before handing it to Dulcie. Dulcie will go on to endure gossiping locals demanding grisly details, incompetent colleagues (Nina Oyama and Tom Ballard), and the arrival of Eddie Redcliffe (Madeline Sami), a rough-as-guts investigator sent from Darwin to help.

The trailer for Deadloch.

McLennan and McCartney had the idea for Deadloch around eight years ago; so much time has passed since then that they both seem surprised by the possibility that people will actually watch it. For reasons unknown to either, both began watching scores of crime dramas while at home with new babies. McCartney recommended Broadchurch to McLennan who, knowing actor Olivia Colman was in it, thought it might be a comedy.

“So I sat down and watched it and went, ohhh this is not funny,” she says. “But there were still elements of Colman’s character that were really funny, because she’s such a gifted comic. So we thought, what if we took a series like that and dialed the comedy up, just a touch, just to see where it will land?”

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The pair called Deadloch “Funny Broadchurch” for ages – “but without the paedophilia; it’s very hard to put a funny spin on that”, says McLennan
– until they found their title in McLennan’s home town. Mortlake, Victoria, population: 1,372 – a town that didn’t even have lake until 1988, when they built one.

“I’ve always wanted to write something about country towns because I think they’re really fascinating, they’re a microcosm of everything else,” McLennan says. “They’re also quite weird and dark.”

Both saw the potential of Tasmania in particular: as the bodies pile high, Deadloch is wrestling with its new reputation as an arty, foodie heaven for rich mainlanders. The town’s winter festival – not dissimilar to Hobart’s Dark Mofo – riles up some of the locals, who remember what Deadloch was like before the “festival of tit art”. Some characters live in caravans, unable to afford the creeping rents. Gentrification, as McCartney puts it, “is always just one store full of nick-nacks away”.

“What do you do with those older industries that were once the lifeblood of a town, that usually involve pillaging the environment in some way? And there is an undeniable, financial benefit to going through gentrification – but people get left behind,” McLennan says. “We wanted to write about all sides.”

Instead of flying in and out during the pandemic, most of the cast and crew relocated to Hobart. McLennan and McCartney lived there for almost six months with their families. On breaks in filming, the cast and crew would go out together to pumpkin festivals or pie-eating competitions. (“The prize was a pie,” McCartney says, delighted.)

Madeleine Sami as Eddie Redcliffe and Kate Box as Dulcie Collins. Photograph: Amazon Studios

Aside from topic or tone, what makes Deadloch most different from their previous work most is that McLennan or McCartney do not appear in it. “We have retreated into our normal selves over the last couple years,” McLennan says, which McCartney translates as: “Going full bridge troll.”

Deadloch was initially a more direct parody of the crime dramas they’d been watching, but as the pair grew more ambitious, the show morphed into something akin to the real thing – just with more laughs. Get Krack!n had left them “slightly broken”, and desperate to make something different.

“The world of morning television is such an aggressive, ugly world – we wanted to make something that looked cinematic and beautiful,” McLennan says.

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The decision to go to a US studio was motivated mainly by money. Amazon leapt on the idea, read “The Cunt Manifesto”, and Deadloch was greenlit. Crucially, the streamer wanted an Australian show that felt Australian, not something about Australia for Americans, which the pair liked. But writing eight hour-long episodes was a steep learning curve. McLennan, for one, used to get “very defensive” about feedback: “When I got notes through, I would just get really angry.”

“You’d go bright red and stay bright red for a couple of hours,” McCartney says.

“I’d just fume,” McLennan sighs. “Whereas now I read notes and go, ‘No, that’s fair enough.’”

“I think that comes with experience,” McCartney says. “And also–”

“Medication,” they sing, perfectly in sync.

Kate Box, Madeleine Sami, Tom Ballard, Nina Oyama and Naarah. Photograph: Amazon Studios

Neither of them remember exactly how or when they first met. Both women had spent years working in comedy: by the 2000s, McCartney, increasingly dispirited by being spoken over by men in writing rooms, temporarily left comedy to work in animation instead. At one point, McLennan voiced a character in an animation McCartney worked on.

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“Comedy was so brutal that it made me think I was not good at it,” McCartney says. “Sometimes, my ideas probably weren’t very good. But I was also always in a room full of white straight dudes who just didn’t have the same experience as me. If you don’t have a mate in the room, who can see why something could be funny or valuable, it’s an uphill battle.”

It wasn’t until 2011 that McLennan and McCartney properly met. Over a bottle of wine, they realised they had finally found their other person in the room. “We were like, ‘Oh, this is something we really need to take care of’,” McLennan says. “And then I kind of made you be my friend.”

“And now we have a WhatsApp filled with crocodile attacks,” McCartney says happily.

They now live two minutes from each other, throw family dinners, and their children are best friends. Even after spending a couple years in each other’s pockets, the day Deadloch wrapped they went for a drink to immediately discuss ideas for the next season.

‘Comedy was so brutal’: McLennan and McCartney. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

“There’s just lots of things throughout my day where I go, McCartney would like that,” McLennan says fondly. “I wake up every morning to at least six reels you think I’ll find funny. That’s your love language.”

“My love language is videos of Bernese mountain dogs,” McCartney replies.

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