, Kate Winslet plays Mare Sheehan, an unvarnished police detective in a small town outside Philadelphia. With a flinty resolve and a disinterest in furthering the illusions carried by others, Mare tries to resolve what she can and puts aside what she can’t.
Sent to a therapist, as all burdened police detectives must be, she introduces herself with the disclaimer that she’s a poor subject. “Wanted to throw that out there so you’re not disappointed if there’s not like a big hallelujah moment,” Mare notes.A seven-episode series screening weekly on Foxtel and Binge,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.
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 incomes from the inhabitants and their lifelong links, so that offending is a series of personal choices. As in the wrenching British crime drama, which has DNA traces found here, knowing more makes the questions easier to ask and the answers so much harder to bear.
This is a sharp but rhetoric-free vision of contemporary America. “Oxy, morphine, you know the rest of the story,” Colin Zabel , 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 is her live-in sparring partner, giving the show a maternal dynamic that is fiercely funny.
Mare Sheehan and Colin Zabel investigate the death of a teen, who may or may not be the victim of a serial killer.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.
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