Winslet Wins in "Mare of Easttown"

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

The prestige miniseries about a  female police detective solving a crime in a small community with a lot of secrets has become its own genre, with "Top of the Lake" and "Sharp Objects" standing out as some of the better ones.  "Mare of Easttown" sets its story in Eastern Pennsylvania, and its success is due in large part to how well creator Brad Inglesby and director Craig Zobel are able to capture the specificity of this corner of the world and its staunch, blue collar characters - their particular dialect, lifestyle quirks, and behaviors.  Family bonds are strong, and every family seems to have ties to every other family, but of course there are lurking dysfunctions and tragedies everywhere. 

Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a local police detective, and former basketball star, who has failed to find a missing teenage girl, Katie Bailey (Caitlin Houlahan) for a year.  Her family life is complicated, and she currently lives with her mother Helen (Jean Smart), teenage daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice), and young grandson Drew (Izzy King).  Things escalate after another teenage girl, Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny), turns up murdered, one with a troubled history and ties to the family of Mare's best friend Lori Ross (Julianne Nicholson).  A county detective, Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), becomes Mare's new partner in the investigation, and a visiting academic, Richard (Guy Pearce), becomes her new love interest.

I like that the  first episode of "Easttown" takes its time to really get the audience situated in it's universe before any major events happen.  This is a place where drug use and poverty are rampant, teen pregnancy is commonplace, and infidelity seems to be a given.  The middle-aged women - Mare, Lori, and Katie's mother Dawn (Enid Graham), are the ones keeping families from falling apart worse than they already have, while the men around them are ineffectual or absent at best.  Everyone seems to have suffered a long list of traumas, and the worst of the neglect and abuse falls on girls like Erin.  I've never been more appreciative that a show cast age-appropriate actors to play the teenagers, so we get the full impact of seeing these young characters in some truly awful situations.  

Kate Winslet anchors the show, giving Mare a grounded toughness and grit that is very appealing.  She looks very much her actual age, and is styled very minimally, so I buy her as a police detective, and more importantly as a mother and grandmother trying, and often failing, to keep her family together.  She's still beautiful and charismatic enough that it's no mystery why Guy Pearce's character is attracted to her, but at the same time it seems perfectly normal to see her eating junk food and wrangling a small child at the doctor's office.  As much as "Easttown" is about a murder investigation, it's also just as much a character piece about Mare.  I like the way the show offers a slow, but steady stream of information about her past, balancing her personal troubles with the unfolding investigation so neither ever dominates the narrative.  

Backing up Winslet is a very strong cast, with Jean Smart and Julianne Nicholson turning in other standout performances.  There are several younger actors who are new to me - Cailee Spaeny, Mackenzie Lansing, and Jack Mulhern - and who I expect I'll be seeing more from in the future.  It's really the performances and the worldbuilding that make the show, much moreso than the fairly rote murder mystery that plays out with a few too many twists and red herrings.  "Easttown" probably would have benefitted from cutting an episode or two, removing some of the more obviously manufactured cliff hangers and false leads.   

Still, this is all around one of the best miniseries in this vein that I've seen in a long time.  It's a treat to see Winslet in a role that fits her talents, and the production does everything right.  This is also a comparatively easy watch next to some of the other prestige television we've seen recently, and not nearly as bleak as I was expecting it to be.  In the end, "Easttown" wants to uplift Mare and women like her, and that's always a welcome thing to see.   

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