It Takes Two: Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney

THE MAGIC that happens when award-winning Australian comedians and writers Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney come together is not lost on the best friends who still pinch themselves at the success that’s come their way. Now they’re back with a major streaming deal with Australian Amazon and Prime Video — showcasing a feminist noir crime thriller Deadloch that is as gory, as it is cliffhanging hilarious. 

The Kates both worked doing the stand-up comedy circuit for years, beginning in the early 2000s, often finding the hard slog a deliriously challenging one. McCartney ditched stand-up to work in animation and post-production for a while around 2009, bored trying to make cis white-men laugh or having to explain her jokes to a male-dominated writing room. McLennan meanwhile stuck at the live circuit to rack up 13 performances at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

As far as comic duos go — sure there’s Kath & Kim before them — but the Kates aren’t taking a minute of their creative chemistry for granted. The viral phenomenon of their deadpan parody cooking show The Katering Show ran for two seasons in 2015 and 2016 — that project firmly pressed them in the psyche of modern pop culture. If you haven’t seen the famous Thermomix episode, it’s a whirling must. The success of that series saw them create a low-budget breakfast TV satire Get Krackin’ in 2017 until 2019 — more deadpan delivery dialled up two-fold. 

Lockdown didn’t halt their ambitions to keep writing as The Kates would pitch a tent in their local park in inner Melbourne’s Thornbury to keep momentum going [within their 5km radius]. This is where they worked on the script for Deadloch — while their kids [they have one child each born six months apart] kept themselves amused on playground equipment for two hours a day. But it was during the witching hours of breastfeeding some years back that they binged on Scandinavian noir crime series and decided to flip the narrative when they had the lightbulb moment to write Deadloch. 

The murderous whodunit is explored with a fresh set of puns in their capable hands. The series revolves around a murder; a dead male body found on the beach. But instead of hysterical weeping women, it’s full of clumsy blokes, those too tapped into their emotions and reverses many glaring stereotypes. 

“I like to think of Deadloch as an orchestral piece of writing,” offers Kate McCartney. 

“From the cerebral wordy humour to fart jokes or someone falling over, we cover a few bases. There is the use of swearing as well — it is blue and crude and we got to do something interesting and different by fusing this all together. The formula is very Australian,” McCartney says.

The pair met in 2009 over Twitter [McLennan reached out to McCartney if she wanted to work on an animation show] and the rest is a satirical pun, deadpan musings and parody served on a contemporary bed of issues affecting Australians today. From race, gender, identity and many other cultural cringe moments, they snappily serve it up on a bloodbath of thrilling mystery. 

I LIKE to think of DEADLOCK as an ORCHESTRAL piece of WRITING

“Our show is intentionally culturally very special,” McCartney says. 

The 43-year-old was born in Perth, moved to Sydney and grew up in Camberwell, Melbourne. 

“I was on the border of Burwood and Camberwell where one postman did one half of the street mail delivery and a different postman delivered did the other side,” McCartney says. 

Now she’s in Preston — a stone’s throw from her mate McLennan in Thornbury. They would rent an office in Collingwood when writing in 2021, until the pandemic nipped that agreement in the bud. McLennan was born in Mortlake and moved to Geelong with her family as a child, before arriving in Melbourne as an adult. She did the Melbourne International Comedy Festival circuit for years and says standing in front of a crowd readies you for failures and not taking things too personally.  

“Co-dependence keeps us together,” says McCartney.

“There’s a bit of Stockholm Syndrome about us too. But we do think about how good we’ve had it lately.  For us it’s about being respectful of each other. We have a history of being in situations where people haven’t quite gotten us and therefore, we know how precious this situation is between us,” she says. 

“And seeing other comedy duos fall apart because they don’t put any work into what they do or their relationships, means we are quite careful with that. It’s the longest relationship I have ever had except with my cat and my family,” McCartney says. 

When one comedy writer hits a mental roadblock, the other will there to catch them.

“Usually, one of us will have the wobble and the other one will be okay,” McLennan says. 

“We have learned to advocate for the other person and always have each other’s back. If one of us doesn’t have the strength to do something, the other person is,” she adds.  

Deadloch was filmed over six months around Tasmania, in a fictitious sleepy seaside town, where two female detectives [Kate Box and Madeleine Sami [yep, that’s Ladyhawke’s life partner] try to solve the mystery together. They’re joined by Katie Robertson [Five Bedrooms], comedian Nina Oyama [Utopia], Alicia Gardener and Tom Bollard.  

“We wanted to do the genre justice and make sure it was a thrilling whodunit,” McLennan says. 

“If we wrote this series eight years ago, it would be very different to today, we have gotten more confident,” McCartney says. 

They’re grateful that Amazon helped them develop the series — with plenty of to and fro-ing, but well worth it in the end.  

“Amazon really backed us and what we wanted to say,” McCartney says. “We had a strong blueprint for what the show would be and while the processes were intense, but I am grateful for it because it made us confident in articulating the ideas and backing them.”

‘Deadloch’ is available to stream on Prime Video from June 2. See the trailer below.