The wokest show on television
Today I would like to boldly make the case that Australian dark comedy/crime show Deadloch is the best show on television. Relatedly, I also think it is the most woke show. By that I mean that Deadloch is a show that features a cast of queer and/or Indigenous women and non-binary people, in complex, diverse, significant roles. They're allowed to be weird and evil and incompetent and they get chances to redeem themselves for all of it. It helps that Madeleine Sami is my most long-term celebrity crush, too.
Deadloch is set in a (sort-of) fantasy world. In it, all men are either outright villains or they're basically irrelevant to the story. Women and non-binary people hold all the notable roles - as mayors, doctors, pub owners, shopkeepers, forensic scientists, philanthropists, detectives, and so on. They also have every type of personality that you might expect to see in a comedy. Our main character Dulcie is an uptight, repressed/depressed police officer with an enthusiastic veterinarian wife, and she's offset by our other main character Eddie, a reckless, crass, smelly, underachieving police officer with a mysterious history. These characters are allowed to fuck up, drastically, and work through it. They exist in messy grey moral territory, like we all do in real life. Everyone also, pleasantly, looks like a normal person. I'm fairly sure none of the casts of Deadloch has had Botox. They just look like people I might know.
Deadloch is described as a "feminist crime parody", but I think it's more like a festival of gay chaos. It does needle a lot of the flaws in the crime genre, and humorously. But what sets it apart for me is how it fully embraces the joy of queer community, the importance of female friendship, and the complexity of relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and white Australians. They achieve all of this with levity, without the heavy-handed lecturing that some modern (well-intentioned) shows have slipped into. The vitality and depth of the relationships in the show are what make it such a compelling watch. It's a fully realised world, and men are not required to make it so. It's funny, it's gripping, it's Kiwi/Aussie excellence, and it has a lot of unexpected representation of underrepresented communities. That is my quick pitch to watch Deadloch (the wokest show on TV).
By contrast, I want to highlight a show that I believe thinks it is woke, but is merely placing a veil of diversity over conservative narratives. That show is Sweet Magnolias. I have been watching Sweet Magnolias since its first season back in 2020. It is a show about three middle-aged women, best friends, living in a small but spunky town called Serenity. They navigate all the extremely dramatic twists and turns of their lives together. There are a smattering of queer and Black characters throughout the cast. It's not nothing, and it's clear that they've tried to cast the show somewhat diversely (though two of the three main characters and their entire families are white and heterosexual). The problem is that all of these characters live in, and play by the rules of, a white Christian heterosexual world. They live very Respectable and Palatable lives. They are accepted, but they are also largely silent about their identities, and about the ways that they might be disadvantaged living in their tiny town in South Carolina. I'm not saying that Helen, the main Black character, should have to talk about being Black all the time, but surely it might come up...sometimes?
I don't actually think Sweet Magnolias is necessarily the worst culprit for the thin woke veneer - Virgin River is definitely worse, and many of the sickly sweet family dramas along similar lines are worse again. I mostly wanted to highlight the difference to make it that much clearer that Deadloch is in a league of its own. The world of the show is queer, female, Indigenous, weird, fun, and unconcerned with being respectable. It has its blunders, but it feels far more like the world I live in than most of the other modern TV I've watched.