I recently needed a distraction for a ten-hour flight. I cannot sleep on flights and I’m also too uncomfortable to do any real work or read. So it has to be binging a show. I chose Deadloch, a murder mystery show with eight one hour episodes, making it the ideal length for a ten hour flight assuming it is compelling enough to stick around.
Deadloch is set in the (fictional) town by the same name, in Tasmania, Australia. The discovery of a body on the beach by two teenagers kicks things off. The victim is the local football coach. It is the first of a string of murders and the victims are all men. The local police detective, Dulcie Collins gets paired up with an outside investigator, Eddie Redcliffe. The two investigators couldn’t be more different. Dulcie is grounded, level-headed, by the book cop. Eddie is rude, brash, quick to accuse without much evidence. Rounding out the investigation team is the eager and intelligent young policewoman Abbie and Sven, a reluctant policeman who likes to delegate but keeps realizing that nobody reports to him so he has to do the things detective Collins asks him to.
Just as colorful as the investigation team are the people being investigated, various residents in Deadloch, all with old conflicts, grudges and connections to the murder victims. All this is happening during Feastival, a festival organized by the new mayor of Deadloch. This provides plenty of material to fill the eight episodes and the Feastival is a continuous source of much of the comedy with the mayor’s desperate efforts to keep it going while all the murders happen.
Needless to say, I stuck around and finished it on the flight. You can catch it on Amazon Prime (I used the Prime app to download all the episodes onto my laptop before the flight. It worked great).