Tuesday TV Touchbase: Deadloch & Invincible

Before I get into today's Tuesday TV Touchbase, let me share a thought on Norman Lear who died last week at the age of 101. 

As a child of the 1970's, I was frequently confronted by Lear's TV shows All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons and Good Times. I can't say I was a fan but as a naive and sheltered kid, I think a lot of the political and social themes went over my head. People tended to yell a lot on Norman Lear shows.  

My mom was a fan of Good Times (people who were actually poorer than us) and The Jeffersons (George Jefferson might have been richer than us with that "deluxe apartment way up in the sky" but he wasn't better than us.) 

I remember an episode of The Jeffersons where George performs CPR to say the life of a white supremacist. When learning a black man saved his life, the guy says "You should've let me die".  Meanwhile, the man's son is grateful to George for saving his father's life. 

The older generation may not learn to let go of hate and ignorance but the next generation will learn to be better.   

So I guess not all of the political and social themes went over my head after all.  

On to this week's Touchbase.

As I have written about before, I have followed crime shows set in or around Australia such as Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries and My Life As Murder (which has been renewed for a 4th season).   

I've recently started watching another Australia set crime show on Amazon Prime called Deadloch.  Cross Broadchurch (a buccolic village rattled by murder) and The L Word (most of the characters are lesbians).  

Deadloch is a quiet little town off the coast of Tasmania which wants to be a little less quiet as it gears up for the annual Winter Feastival, a celebration of local art, cuisine and culture.  

Then the murders began. 

It begins with a naked dude who washes up dead on the beach with his tongue cut out and his penis is on fire.  

Then another body turns up. Then another. And another. 

All dudes. 

Deadloch police sergeant Dulcie Collins is trying to be professional and methodical about this. But she gets saddled with an out of town detective named Eddie Redcliffe. Eddie is brash, reckless, loud, NOT at all professional and methodical, her clothes are always dirty and you can tell through the TV screen she smells bad. Eddie keeps trying to rush the case to a conclusion because she wants to get the hell out of Deadloch. 

As if the murders and the badly behaving "detective" whose making things worse weren't enough, Dulcie has to deal with her wife Cath who is needy, clingy and possessive. Despite dealing with a possible serial killer eating up Dulcie's time, Cath still insists on her wife participating in Feastival activities like the town choir's performance of "I Touch Myself".

Yes, there is a choral arrangement for the Divinyls' ode to self pleasure.

And here it is.

 As I write this, I'm through 3 episodes where we finally get to a point where we find out why Eddie is such a blustery and foul smelling mess and maybe, just maybe she'll start listening to Dulcie.  

Deadloch is a potent mix of quirky characters in a town that is hiding more secrets than one might expect for a small quiet town. Like which one of them is a serial killer.

While I'm over there on Amazon Prime, I'm catching up season 2 of Invincible. In the aftermath of season 1 where Mark Grayson got the crap beat out of him by his father Omni Man who is NOT the the world protecting savior he claimed to be but is the forerunner of an alien invasion, Mark and his mother Debbie are experiencing a lot of PTSD but not exactly coping well with it. 

Debbie has descended into a drunken spiral of depression. Mark is working extra hard to stay busy, offering up Invincible to work for Cecil Stedman's Global Defense Agency while Mark graduates from high school and goes off to college. 

Or drops all that to go save an alien race only to find the ruler of that race is... Omni-Man.

Then things get really complicated. 

What makes Invincible unique is that while it looks like a classic brightly colored super hero story, there is an attention to detail. Super powers hurt and not just the physical stuff like bloody broken bodies and collateral property damage but they can cause pain mentally, emotionally.  The consequences of being a super hero are real and devastating to both the person with powers and to those in their orbit as family, friends and lovers. Invincible explores those consequences.  

That's 4 episodes of season 2 of Invincible when another set of 4 set to drop sometime in 2024.  

And that is that for this week's Touchbase. 

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.