“When we were really early new mums, breastfeeding during the night kind of new mums, we had a lot of time on our hands,’’ McCartney explains.

“So we just started watching stuff, and for some reason – and I don’t know what this says about our mental state – we started watching crime dramas, European, Scandi noir-type crime dramas. And then also (British crime drama) Broadchurch, things like that. Stuff with a certain aesthetic and a tone and a temporal quality to the drama and to the way it was shot.

“And so when we started talking about using those shows as a blueprint for writing a funny version of that … both for what we wanted to talk about and then also just by virtue of the aesthetic we were trying to achieve … Tasmania was a really obvious fit for us.’’

“We knew the beginning of (the storyline), and we knew the end point of it. But at that point I don’t think we quite knew how long it was going to be or the character arcs and that sort of stuff. But we knew what we wanted it to look like, and we knew Tasmania was integral to that.’’

So the two Kates – Melbourne-based friends and comedians who had already had success with food parody YouTube/ABC TV series The Katering Show in 2015 and again with breakfast television satire series Get Krack!n in 2017 – decided to spend a child-free week in Tasmania, in January 2018, with the hope of finding inspiration for their script. And Tasmania didn’t disappoint.

“We did a little trip down to Tassie … it was in between seasons of Get Krack!n,’’ McLennan recalls.

“And we set ourselves the task of writing a pilot script, this was before anyone else was involved with the show. So we booked ourselves a trip to Bruny Island. We caught the ferry over, and hired a little shack and wrote the pilot down there.

“And on one of the days that we were writing, we thought ‘oh, we’ll go for a drive’, and this was in January, so we went for a drive and we ended up going from one side of Bruny Island to another. But instead of going around on the main road, we ended up taking some dirt track, one of the across roads, which we should not have done in a hire car. But anyway, we did it and as we climbed up this mountain, our phone reception dropped out, and the mist just sort of descended and there were just these massive gum trees in all directions, and it got quite spooky.’’

They were not dressed correctly for the imposing weather and grew nervous about what would happen if their hire car, which was struggling to make it up the hilly terrain, broke down.

“We sort of thought, this is the middle of summer and it feels like it could be the height of winter,’’ McLennan says.

“And it does feel like we could get murdered out here. We kind of went ‘yeah, this is the right place for this story’. And we did kind of have that in mind as we were writing everything from then on. And then obviously when the show did get commissioned by Amazon, they were really drawn to the idea of shooting in Tassie.’’

McLennan says American Tyler Burn, who commissioned the idea as an Australian Amazon Original for Prime Video, had previously visited Tasmania on a holiday and was “really on-board” with the idea of shooting their eight-part crime comedy series, Deadloch, in the state.

“So it was all systems go for shooting down there,’’ she says.

The highly anticipated show, which will air on Prime Video on June 2, is set in the fictional Tasmanian town of Deadloch, a once-sleepy seaside hamlet where residents are left reeling when a local man turns up dead on the beach. Two female detectives are thrown together to solve the case, fastidious local Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins and a rough-as-guts blow-in from Darwin, Senior Investigator Eddie Redcliffe, along with their overeager junior constable Abby. As the town prepares to launch the annual arts, food and culture event – Winter Feastival – the trio have to put their differences aside and work together to find the killer.

The series, which was written by McLennan and McCartney and produced by Guesswork Television (which produced Australian comedy series Rosehaven), as well as OK Great Productions and Amazon Studios, was filmed at Kingston, Snug, Cygnet, Richmond, Dunalley and various other Tasmanian locations during the first half of last year.

The series features a large ensemble cast (including a number of Tasmanians) and is led by Kate Box (Fires, Wentworth), Madeleine Sami (The Breaker Upperers), Nina Oyama (Utopia), Tom Ballard (Tonightly with Tom Ballard) as well as Alicia Gardiner (Wakefield, Offspring), Susie Youssef (Rosehaven), Pamela Rabe (Wentworth), Kris McQuade (Rosehaven), Duncan Fellows (The Letdown), Harvey Zielinski (Don’t Look Deeper), Shaun Martindale (The Tailings), Katie Robertson (Five Bedrooms), Nick Simpson-Deeks (Winners & Losers), Mia Morrissey (Home And Away), Leonie Whyman (Dark Place) and Mick Davies (Rosehaven) as well as Holly Austin, Kartanya Maynard and Naarah.

Cinematic, thrilling, mysterious and moody, the comedy is served up alongside a genuinely suspenseful ‘whodunit’ story which interrogates the crime genre and Australia’s relationship with truth, misogyny, violence, gender, and race.

Despite the enthusiasm for filming the series in Tasmania, McLennan says it was challenging at times, purely because of the Coronavirus pandemic and resulting border closures.

“It did become a little problematic during the writing process,’’ McLennan says, of having the series set in Tasmania. Because obviously the pandemic hit and we were over here in Melbourne and we weren’t able to go to Tassie at all during the writing process.’’

But they made up for lost time once travel restrictions eased.

“The first day that Tassie opened up their borders McCartney and I were on a plane at 6.15am,’’ she laughs.

They came to Tasmania for location reconnaissance missions, visiting various parts of the state to work out which areas would be best suited for bringing their fictional Tassie town to life on screen. They were based in Hobart and so, for budgetary purposes, set about creating a radius of how far they could travel in various directions to achieve what they needed.

“With the town of Deadloch, we knew we were probably going to create one town out of several locations,’’ McLennan explains.

“And so a lot of those initial location recces (were to work out) which locations have what we need. With Deadloch there’s a beach, and so Kingston became the town beach. And then we have a lake, and so the lake ended up being lots of different locations that we use. And then we’ve got the main street and the police station, which Cygnet sort of became the main street of the town. Which in my mind, Cygnet has the geography of Deadloch. It’s amazing, that town is just so incredible. There’s lots of incredible shops in the main street of Cygnet, where you have these great shopfronts but then just behind the shopfronts you see these green hills and trees and paddocks, it’s just beautiful down there.’’

They also shot at a historic house at Richmond, where McCartney confesses she became “completely addicted” to chocolate-covered raspberry lollies from the Sweets & Treats lolly shop.

“Now when I know someone is going to Tassie I’m like ‘can you go and get me some chocolate?’,’’ she laughs.

But she says the chocolate wasn’t the only thing she loved about working in Tasmania.

“Hobart, and Tassie in general, has just got a really good reputation within the industry,’’ McCartney says. “They’ve just been so well set up with local cast and crew for TV productions. The benefit also is Tasmania has got so many different landscapes and that’s just like a cinematographer’s dream.’’

“And it doesn’t take that long to get places as well. You go five minutes down the road from Hobart you’re on a full beach, and then five minutes the other way in Hobart and you’re in this temperate rainforest, it’s just gorgeous. And cost effective!’’

McLennan was equally as smitten by the state and its natural beauty.

“I know this probably sounds very trite to say, but Tassie really is a character in the show, it’s really on show,’’ she says.

“There’s some incredible drone footage that we’ve got, particularly in the first episode, of beautiful shots down at South Arm, where, you know, these cars are driving along the isthmus, it just looks amazing. I’ve never seen Tassie in that way before on camera.

“I’d sort of seen shows that had used the forest and that misty kind of landscape but we hadn’t seen that coastal depiction so much. The DOP (Director of Photography) Katie Milwright and our set-up director Ben Chessell said they were really keen to get those shots in, just to show Tassie in a new light.’’

Many Tasmanian actors feature in the show, and McCartney says it was wonderful to have Indigenous actors, including Sinsa Mansell, working on Deadloch.

“We had the great honour and pleasure of having Sinsa Mansell involved in the production,’’ McCartney says.

“And the level of knowledge that she had, and the community had, around shell middens and ochre – we got such an education on the place, that just went beyond 200 years of history... there’s this extraordinary ancient culture that is living and present, it was just gorgeous and beautiful, we felt very lucky.’’

Prior to making that trip to Bruny Island to start writing their pilot in 2018, both women had limited experience with Tasmania.

McCartney’s family live in Perth, Western Australia, so most of her holidays are spent going back to Perth. But she did once enjoy a driving trip around the coast of Tasmania with her housemates as an adult, and remembers visiting Seahorse World, near Launceston. She also toured the state with Tasmanian comedian Hannah Gadsby and visited Mona. Meanwhile one of McLennan’s best friends hails from Tasmania’s East Coast, so she had previously visited St Helens a couple of times in her twenties.

McCartney confesses she got a lot of parking fines in Hobart. She says one of her favourite parts of filming in Hobart was being based in an office overlooking Hobart’s waterfront.

“One of the best and most delightful parts, and quite meaningful things, was our office overlooked the Hobart harbour area,’’ she explains. On the right of our building we could see the Antarctic ship, the Nuyina, that was just outside our window.’’

They enjoyed watching the ship come and go during their six months while working in Tassie, while also getting an insight into what day-to-day life in Tassie was like.

“We spent a lot of time going to the office in the morning, where, particularly on the weekends, you’re watching the day change in front of you,’’ McLennan says.

“In the morning there’d be all the people, the tourists, going down to Salamanca, and then you’d sort of watch the hens and bucks parties happen, and that would get progressively messier.’’

And then at 11pm they’d enjoy watching the buskers perform with portable microphones.

“I remember (a busker) playing You’re the Voice and everyone joining in and just having this singalong on the wharf,’’ McLennan recalls.

“It was 2am one night, when we were still working, and we ended up putting that song in the show as a result.’’

McCartney says Tasmania left a lasting impression on her, and she feels a real connection to the place, despite being back in Melbourne.

“Do you know what I really miss?’ she says.

“I got a pang of it the other day. I miss kunanyi, I miss the mountain. I was staying in Sandy Bay (during filming), obviously you can see (the mountain) everywhere. But having that incredible natural structure there just out the window, and seeing snow, that was so exciting. And just it being this real presence and personality and this obviously very sacred kind of place, that was just there. It was really beautiful.’’

“It was great waking up to that every morning,’’ McLennan adds.

The Kates both started writing sketch comedy in their twenties and are now both in their forties. McCartney says working in “a landscape that is hyperactive and bright and ethically-grey’’ had taken an “emotional toll” on the women and they had “just yearned for something that had a little bit more meat on the bones’’, which is how Deadloch eventuated.

McLennan agrees.

“We really wanted to write something that had character development,’’ she says.

“You know that we could take these characters from episode to episode and expand on their story and really dig deep with their characters. We knew if we wanted to write something that had the time and the space to explore these stories and themes and characters that we would need hour-long episodes to do it.

“But the other side of that is, that if we wanted to do these hour-long episodes, they would have to be really gripping, and they would have to build intrigue and a genuine whodunit story. And we just wanted to make something we’d watch.

“We treated the crime and the comedy with equal reverence. Yes, we do want this to be funny, but we need it to be really gripping as well. We were always serving those two objectives with the show.”

Deadloch will be available to 200 million Prime Video subscribers in 240 countries and territories across the globe. So it’s an exciting time for the Kates, but also exciting for Tasmania.

“It deserves to be front and centre,’’ McCartney says of the state.

“It’s so beautiful. But I reckon you guys have been sitting on it a bit, haven’t you? Deliberately not mentioning how amazing it is down there.

“I’m really proud that we got to put our show down there, and really grateful that we were received in the way that we were. I’m really looking forward to people responding to it in the way we did.

“We went down there (to Tasmania) during the pandemic in 2021 and we had been in lockdowns and stuff on the mainland. And coming down to Tasmania was just like heaven for both cast and crew. We just sort of wandered around in this daze like we’d been in a bunker for two years, and I can only imagine how the rest of the world will respond in the same way.’’•

Deadloch, an Australian Amazon Original, launches on Prime Video, on June 2. The first three episodes will be available initially, with new episodes released every Friday, leading up to the season finale, on July 7.