Kate Winslet’s performance in Mare of Easttown makes for a highly watchable show.Credit:HBO/Foxtel
A seven-episode series screening weekly on Foxtel and Binge,Mare of Easttown is a show so lived in,so understanding of the grind that people can tell themselves is simply a routine,that it transcends the police procedural it identifies as. The show has crime scenes,including the frustratingly generic one featuring a murdered young woman that gives the plot impetus,but its defining texture is kitchen table clutter,snatched snacks and domestic conversations. These lives,for better or worse,are filled up.
Small towns are often the setting for murder mysteries because they provide a unique backdrop,but the establishing shots here are of mundane row houses and sagging infrastructure. The specificity inMare of Easttown comes from the inhabitants and their lifelong links,so that offending is a series of personal choices. As in the wrenching British crime dramaHappy Valley,which has DNA traces found here,knowing more makes the questions easier to ask and the answers so much harder to bear.
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This all combines for a deeply watchable show:creator Brad Ingelsby has crafted a series of concurrent investigations – some criminal,others personal – that Mare undertakes even if she’s unwilling to acknowledge their connection. It’s dense storytelling,but purposeful – Mare’s victim,Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny),is not an anonymous,bloodied body but a loving teenaged mother caught between an absent ex-boyfriend and an angry father. Her baby son is both glue for surviving kin and a reminder that families can easily fracture.
This is a sharp but rhetoric-free vision of contemporary America. “Oxy,morphine,you know the rest of the story,” Colin Zabel (Evan Peters),a detective seconded to an unimpressed Mare,says of an opioid victim. Households are multi-generational and makeshift,including Mare’s,where she is divorced and her son is lost,but not her grandson. Mare’s mother,Helen (the incomparable Jean Smart) is her live-in sparring partner,giving the show a maternal dynamic that is fiercely funny.
Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) and Colin Zabel (Evan Peters,standing) investigate the death of a teen,who may or may not be the victim of a serial killer.Credit:HBO/Foxtel
There are points where the accumulated loss and struggle that Mare keeps pushing uphill verges on the overwhelming,but when that same outlook is applied to merely sketched supporting characters,it feels contrived. One brief scene has the cancer-suffering mother of a missing daughter – who Mare hasn’t been able to find for a year – comparing predicaments with the friend who thinks her marriage is done because she let her addict brother move back into the family’s basement. At a certain point,stoic endurance risks scepticism.