She’s lost a grown son to suicide gotten divorced from her husband (David Denman), who’s now engaged to another woman and she’s trying to raise the grandson that her own son left behind. There are legitimate reasons for Mare to be cynical. Mare of Easttown invites us to view things the way that Mare does: with enough attention to catch the slightest change in a facial expression that may hint at a lie and with enough cynicism to think it’s possible that even people you’ve known forever could be capable of unspeakable behavior. Ingelsby and director Craig Zobel, who presided over multiple episodes of The Leftovers and last year’s The Hunt, toss these red flags without being gimmicky about it. (Spoiler alert: Mare Sheehan doesn’t warm up to most people right away.) Our suspicions are raised, lowered, then raised again toward an array of local suspects in Erin’s homicide. We witness Mare doing plenty of police work, particularly in concert with Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), a county detective who is called in to assist her and to whom she doesn’t warm up right away. A lot of the storytelling centers on the murder of Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny), a teenager and mother of an infant son who is found dead by the conclusion of episode one under circumstances that may be connected to an unsolved missing-person case involving the daughter of an old high-school friend of Mare’s. I mean, it certainly is that, to an extent. It turns out that Mare of Easttown isn’t strictly a crime drama. HBO sent five of the seven episodes to critics, and by episode three, I was fully invested in Mare Sheehan, played by a thoroughly committed Kate Winslet, and the lives of everyone connected to her in this place she’s called home for her entire life. That mood, mixed with all those other elements, evokes a number of recent and semi-recent series, including Happy Valley, Top of the Lake, Sharp Objects, and Clarice.īut Mare of Easttown, created and written by Brad Ingelsby ( Our Friend, The Way Back), distinguishes itself with strong characters who will grow on viewers with each hour-long installment they consume. Immediately, you feel the sense of melancholy embedded in the cellular makeup of this close-knit, working-class hamlet. The show is set in a small Pennsylvania town whose modest brick homes, lined up in neat rows, chimney after chimney, are among the first images that appear in episode one, which begins in the azure light of a brisk winter day as the sun slowly rises. Its protagonist is a traumatized police detective who pushes boundaries to get to the bottom of the case, a type that’s figured into such crime stories since practically forever. The HBO limited series, debuting tonight, follows an attempt to solve the murder of a young woman and the possibly related disappearances of two others, a plot that’s played out on television more times than can be counted. At first, Mare of Easttown looks familiar.
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