The word “trauma” has, in recent years, undergone the inflation and ideological distortion that such psychological concepts often suffer. But trauma is very real, and HBO’s new seven-part miniseries Mare of Easttown is a thoughtful, engrossing study of the ways in which people process, or fail to process, personal tragedy and social breakdown and the ways in which intertwined cords of community connection can both fortify people and magnify their pain.
From 2017 to 2019, I reported and wrote several unrelated newspaper features about people who died unnatural and violent deaths. I wrote about police officers ambushed and murdered by domestic extremists. I wrote about an American missionary killed by an uncontacted island tribe. I wrote about a lawyer who burned himself to death to protest inaction on climate change. I wrote about a man in Texas attempting to solve the murder of his 16-year-old daughter, possibly by a serial killer.
Reporting these pieces meant interviewing family members who were often recently bereaved and reluctant to talk to a journalist, as well as reconstructing, blow by blow, the circumstances of death. The experience left me uneasy — I was able to write these exciting stories only because of other people’s tragedies. The last story, in particular, which concerned a region of Texas where many women and girls had been murdered or had disappeared, left me with, for a short time, an aversion to true crime and to fictional films and TV shows in which the murder or abduction of a young woman figures as a plot device.
But the human race has a seemingly insatiable appetite for crime procedurals. This isn’t terribly surprising: Crime shows (and films and novels) come with a ready-made sense of stakes (life and death, crime and punishment, good and evil). And police detectives are useful protagonists for a work of fiction; like private investigators, lawyers, or reporters, their occupation is investigative and adversarial and provides an excuse, narratively, for a protagonist to interact with a diverse cast of characters from a broad spectrum of society. Accordingly, the entertainment industry churns out new crime shows at an industrial pace, safe in the knowledge that even at their least original, they will always find a ready audience. And even the most prestigious shows seem, often, to fall back on the same cliches or conceits.
“I haven’t heard of it,” said a friend when I mentioned Mare of Easttown, “but let me guess. The main character is a detective? And the detective is a loner, trying to cope with some sort of addiction or tragedy? And this latest case will fill the void but also push him or her to the brink?”
“Well, correct,” I said. “And, before you ask, yes, it is set in a small town where nothing is what it seems.”
Mare Sheehan (the magnificent Kate Winslet, speaking in an impressively realistic southeast Pennsylvania accent) is a detective-sergeant in a blue-collar town on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The setting, a strong suit of the show, is distinctly Rust Belt, opioid-era America and closer to rural than suburban. Sheehan, competent, gruff, and tired, is divorced and lives with her mother (perennial audience favorite Jean Smart), her lesbian teenage daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice), and her toddler grandson, whose father, Sheehan’s son, is dead. Sheehan’s ex-husband, Frank (David Denman), lives next door with his new wife, and her cousin, a Catholic priest (Neal Huff), also resides nearby with another priest (James McArdle), who was forced out of a previous parish under a cloud of suspicion. Sheehan is dogged by her continued failure to solve the disappearance of a teenage girl, whose mother, Dawn (Enid Graham), is waging a one-woman pressure campaign on the local police department. Sheehan’s boss, the police chief (John Douglas Thompson), has agreed to allow an outside detective from the county police (Evan Peters) to assist with the case and perhaps step on Sheehan’s toes.
Still following? There’s more: a teenage mother (Cailee Spaeny), splitting care of a baby with her surly ex-boyfriend (Jack Mulhern) and his nasty, territorial new girlfriend; a local woman (Chinasa Ogbuagu) pushed to the brink of nervous breakdown by her drug-addicted brother; and Sheehan’s grandson’s recovering addict mother (in other words, Sheehan’s dead son’s ex-girlfriend) (Sosie Bacon), who is fighting to take custody of the child from the Sheehans. Oh, and a courtly, slightly washed-up writer (Guy Pearce) has come to town to teach at a local college and develops romantic designs on the standoffish Mare.
The dizzying number of complicatedly intertwined characters is, while more than sometimes confusing, mostly a strength. Mare of Easttown, one soon realizes, is not one of those crime shows that opens with a dead body. It is one of those drama-crime shows, rich in acting, character development, and setting, that will only eventually, almost apologetically, get to the dead body after flawlessly drawing you into its world. If the first season of True Detective, HBO’s atmospheric, machismo-soaked detective drama, birthed a thousand imitators, it also clearly birthed a few successors determined to combine True Detective’s ambition with a more plausible and restrained style of storytelling. Mare of Easttown, created and written by Brad Ingelsby, a Delaware County, Pennsylvania, native, and directed by Craig Zobel, has more in common with two series created by the showrunner Veena Sud: AMC’s The Killing, which explored the outward, rippling effects of a homicide in Seattle on the victim’s family and the city’s election campaign, and Seven Seconds, Netflix’s excellent if overlong 2018 series about the personal and political consequences when a police officer in Jersey City runs over a black teenage boy and covers up the accident.
Not that Mare of Easttown entirely escapes the expected narrative tropes, which become more obvious and numerous as the episodes progress: a possible serial killer on the loose, a reprimanded detective taken off a case who keeps investigating it anyway, a shootout in a derelict house with more than a small debt to the basement climax of The Silence of the Lambs, some probably unnecessary romantic B-plots, a grief-crazed father, a grief-desperate mother. And there are the usual narrative tricks, such as littering the plot with red-herring possible culprits and introducing unlikable characters only to double-back later to humanize them with empathetic detail. Perhaps most frustratingly, the person responsible for some of the show’s most disturbing acts of evil is revealed in the fifth episode to be a previously unseen character, which feels like a bit of a cheat. The good news is that Mare of Easttown is a miniseries, not a full show, meaning that we can trust that we are in the hands of a mostly tightly written and self-contained narrative, rather than at the mercy of a writers’ room throwing open-ended story arcs at a wall to see what sticks.
And even the cliches are forgivable. The unfortunate fact is that there are unknowable predators who prey on prostitutes, addicts, and the socially marginal; there are, in our society, countless unsolved deaths and disappearances, each leaving a gaping psychic wound in someone, and grief does drive people to extraordinary and irrational lengths. Parents on quixotic crusades to solve their child’s murder absolutely exist, and impoverished, opioid-addicted communities do tend to have a lot of unconventional and slightly convoluted family structures. And the sad reality, as I learned on more than one occasion as a reporter, is that people who have had a personal experience of violence or tragedy have often had more than one, sometimes an unfathomable number, the tragedies building on themselves by the cruel, multiplying logics of poverty and bad luck.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
