HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” was a bonafide hit, a multilayered poitboiler featuring an A-list actress (Kate Winslet) dressing down as an emotionally stunted cop sacrificing her well-being to solve a mysterious crime in the Philadelphia area. So it stands to reason that, chasing that success, other streamers would chase that kind of crime-novel high; Peacock’s “Long Bright River,” for all its good intentions, is haunted by the specter of that better, braver version of the story.
Adapted from the novel by Liz Moore, “Long Bright River” trades Easttown for Kensington, and Mare for Mickey (Amanda Seyfried), a lifelong resident who’s just about the only cop walking the beat that’s actually from this neighborhood. When we first meet her, she’s already world-wearied, juggling the stressors of being a single parent to her son, Thomas (a bowl-cut moppet played by Callum Vinson), with the consistent string of sex workers and unhoused struggling through the opioid crisis. When she and her partner Eddie (Dash Mihok) find the latest in a string of mysterious overdoses among the city’s destitute, she’s triggered by past trauma. And if you guessed that most of “Long Bright River”‘s punishing eight-hour runtime (long is the operative word) will sink deep into those traumas, you’d be right.
You see, Mickey’s also looking for her missing sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), whom flashbacks tell us took a much different path than her by-the-book sister. While Mickey spent her teenhood in a youth police training program (where she’d meet, and be groomed by, her predatory now-ex-husband, Simon (Matthew Del Negro), Kacey eventually found herself strung out, prostituting herself for cash. The pair fell out, and Kacey has disappeared. Mickey thinks the not-quite-overdoses hitting the streets might be related to who took her, and she ends up recruiting her estranged former partner, Truman (Nicholas Pinnock), to help.
I don’t know whether these weaknesses are endemic to the source material, or whether showrunner Nikki Toscano (“Hunters“) has added or adapted the material in particularly unsubtle ways, but “Long Bright River” takes a slow, plodding road through familiar territory. The show glides through eight hour-long episodes with all the urgency of a SEPTA train, creaking and groaning with all the bloat endemic to these kinds of streaming miniseries. It’s an old complaint, to be sure, but it applies here: These are the kinds of novels we’d adapt into brisk 100-minute mid-budget thrillers in the 1990s, with someone like Julianne Moore playing Mickey. Now, that kind of movie is gone, so off these kinds of Dennis Lehane-adjacent potboilers go to streamers who stretch the plot like so much taffy into something repetitive and tedious.
Seyfried, to her credit, sinks into the material with worthwhile dedication; her Mickey is frazzled, frustrated, and burdened by lifelong traumas the events of the series force her to confront. The trouble is, the show positions her mysteries as more important than the crimes she’s investigating, when the script merely withholds information from us (and the characters) for maximum pathos and melodrama. Who killed those girls? Was it her ex-husband? Was it this random criminal? Is it either of her two partners? Was it her irascible grandpa (John Doman) or the nosy neighbor (Harriet Sansom Harris, the clear MVP here)? The show alternates between how much it cares about that and how much it wants to wallow in Mickey’s misfortune, played out over repetitive heart-to-hearts with every supporting character over the same issues ad nauseam. At a certain point, it feels like the character of Thomas only exists to be monologued at.
It’s really the circular nature of the script, and its languid pacing and numerous red herrings, that lets the otherwise-workmanlike nature of the miniseries down. Entire plot turns depend on someone delivering a piece of information in a way precisely engineered to be misunderstood, so we can spend an hour on a red herring culprit. And by the time we find out where Kacey’s gone, and whether she even has anything to do with the murders, what’s preceded those reveals hasn’t been compelling enough to command our attention. Don’t forget all the hammer-on-head metaphors for grief or the banality of evil; Faust, Steinbeck, angels and demons, they all get trotted out when the series decides to make its character sound vaguely profound.
Perhaps it’s unfair to bang on so mercilessly; after all, in its more intriguing moments “Long Bright River” becomes a story about sisterhood and obligation, about the failings we internalize when we don’t show up for our family in the way we might like to. But this one doesn’t have any new angles on it, just a miserablist dirge that poor Seyfried (and Harris, and Doman) have to hold aloft like Atlas for far too long. By its closing scenes, when characters just sit down to have a nice long cry about their feelings, it’s hard to find many reasons why “Long Bright River” couldn’t have made the journey to that catharsis a little more exciting.
Entire season screened for review. Streaming March 13 on Peacock.
