Mare of Easttown

I definitely wasn't expecting to like Mare of Easttown as much as I did. The trailers for it just looked ok and Kate Winslet is always good in everything she does but I still put it off because it only looked ok. I was wrong. It was better than ok, it was flat out good. I was bored and looking for something new to watch and heard nothing but good things about this series and so I finally started watching it. Once I started I couldn't stop, I binged all seven episodes over the course of a weekend. I know it was only suppose to be a one season miniseries but I've read that because it did so well that they might do another season. I hope they do and this time I won't put it off for so long.

Kate Winslet is an outstanding actress and the other actors are right at her level! The storylines are intriguing and have kept me tuning in each week. BRAVO HBO! I really appreciate how Kate portrays REAL WOMEN - the good, the bad, the ugly - without apologies or compromises.

Easttown is a close-knit community outside of Philadelphia. It's a place where tragedy and drugs have been weighting on its people. Yet they survive. Police Detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) has been under pressure to solve the case of a friend's missing daughter for the past year. Another girl ends up dead and Mare is given the case.

This is the era of the tragic small town murder mystery. It's the Broadchurch subgenre except in this one, the whodunnit element is almost subservient to the emotional intra-family relationships. It's a big time star doing a specific accent and a cast of great actors contributing great characters. Other standout performances include Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, and Evan Peters. It's the personal connections and specific characterizations. SNL did a fun sendup which almost killed me. It's probably going to be a limited series. It would be hard to gather the cast again and the story wraps up almost perfectly. Mare could do more adventures but it would be hard for it to be as personal as this one.

We don't have an HBO subscription so I was able to view this limited series (7 episodes, each roughly one hour) on a set of DVDs from my public library. My wife started with me but abandoned it after just half of the first episode, she didn't like the brusque nature of Mare, but that is part of her character arc, influenced by losses she had recently suffered. I believe my wife would have enjoyed the series if she had stuck with it.

It is set in the somewhat fictional town of Easttown, but in fact much of it does take place in the real Easttown Township, Pa. A community where most everyone knows everyone else and many are related to each other. A community where people often don't even knock or ring the doorbell when going to visit someone, they just walk it.

There are two significant crimes causing community friction, one is the disappearance of two young ladies, the other is a murder of a third young lady. They might be connected, they might not. Much of the roughly 7 hours of running time is in some way associated with trying to solve those crimes. They eventually are, they involve people of the community, and there are some big surprises along the way. And there are a number of Red herrings to keep the viewers guessing.

It is clearly fiction but what makes it so good and so interesting are the characters that really could be real people in any small community. Plus the dialog is uniformly well written. The discs have a number of interesting "making of" extras and it is revealed that Winslet often modified the written dialog, adding or substituting things that would make Mare more realistic.

Watching the whole thing is a big investment of time but I am glad I did, overall very interesting. And Winslet shows why she is one of the best of her generation.

The fact that a Brit mastered the very isolated DelCo accent is incredibly impressive. A very small percentage of Philly suburbanites have that accent and she delivered beautifully.

Now onto the actual storyline. It's meticulously crafted and the characters are so well developed you feel as though you're watching your next door neighbor play a part in a TV show. It doesn't scream Hollywood, which gives it such a real feel that you almost forget you're watching a show and not a documentary. The plot was not exaggerated nor was predictable. I enjoyed every minute. This is a job well done.