Even by the standards of police dramas, which for obvious reasons like to focus on repulsive crimes, the new import Deep Water touches on something especially abhorrent: the systematic murder of gay men for sport.
Deep Water, a four-part Australian miniseries, becomes available starting Monday through the import service Acorn (www.acorn.tv).
The series focuses more on the ways in which two dogged detectives expose the crimes than on the twisted motivation behind them. But it’s a good reminder that homophobia is not something the world has moved beyond.
Yael Stone (top), who may be best known in the U.S. lately for her role in Orange Is the New Black, plays Tori Lustigman, a detective in Bondi, New South Wales.
She and her partner Nick Manning (Noah Taylor, top) are assigned to a murder case in which a young man has been killed in his bed.
It soon becomes clear he was gay, and while the police brass want to write it off as a domestic quarrel turned lethal, Tori isn’t so sure.
Against massive resistance, she starts looking for evidence it might be a hate crime. At first, Nick is among those who fear she’s following bad intuition, and it turns out to be true that she has a personal interest in the subject – another reason many of her fellow cops think her pursuit may be largely driven by obsession.
Soon, however, little bits of evidence start turning up. So does one big bit of evidence, which is dozens of suspicious deaths among gay men going back to the late 1980s.
By reopening these cases, most of which have been closed with verdicts like suicide or accidents, Tori starts making some nasty enemies. There are people, it turns out, who were quite happy all those cases were closed with relatively benign explanations.
Unsurprisingly, these enemies are not nice people, and the more her investigation uncovers, the more complicated and dangerous her path.
While Deep Water remains more a cop story than a victim story, it doesn’t ignore the humanity of those who were killed for no other reason than being who they were.
Taylor convincingly portrays a detective who comes to the table cautiously. Stone, on the other hand, is the show’s impassioned heart, the voice that refuses to be silent even while she’s just doing her job.
Somewhat incidentally, fans of the old series The Killing won’t miss some uncanny similarities between Tori and Mireille Enos’ Sarah Linden. Tori has the same professional drive, the same difficult relationship with single motherhood, the same kinds of issues with a skeptical boss and a quirky, skilled partner.
Tori even pulls her hair back the same stark way, making her look eerily similar to Sarah.
Tori does, however, seem to have a better diet.
Maybe that’s because she, like viewers, has trouble stomaching the disturbingly wide circle of people who perpetrate hate crimes and either justify them or rationalize ways to live with them.