As I said last week, tonal shifts of the sort Mare is attempting require a strong, almost singular creative mind behind them. I’ve seen no evidence thus far that either creator and writer Brad Ingelsby or director Craig Zobel have what it takes to pull it off. Rather, the show comes off as determined to cut its serious material off at the knees with cheap twists and bad comedy, while the lighter material plays on as if oblivious to the steadily mounting pile of abused and murdered bodies.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

And so, without a stable ethical foundation to stand on, the whole thing teeters and wobbles on the verge of collapse. There’s just no way to have, say, the slapstick teen sex comedy of Siobhan’s situation and Helen’s whack on the noggin on the one hand and the Silence of the Lambs–style abduction of women on the other and make them both work without that foundation. You can’t portray, for example, Mare’s continued presence in the investigation from which she’s been barred like it’s simple dogged detective work when she’s also keeping huge secrets from her own partner (who, I remind you, has also asked her out). For god’s sake, you can’t have Mare balancing multiple suitors and make it cute while she’s been suspended from the force for a fucking felony that’s getting swept under the rug!

I reviewed the baffling fourth episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

Here’s the thing about that: Mare of Easttown clearly expects us to take its title character’s side. Yes, even when she’s raiding the department’s evidence locker for packets of heroin she can plant in an ex-junkie’s vehicle in order to ruin said ex-junkie’s life. This isn’t portrayed as a heinous act of corruption and authoritarianism, but as the rash but understandable act of a grandmother acting in her grandson’s best interest. For me? It just left me wondering how many real-world cases of police misconduct get justified by the participants and swept under the rug by their superiors in the way that Mare and the Chief do here. It’s darkly fascinating to see to whom Mare of Easttown is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, you know?

I reviewed Sunday’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

The titular Mare of Easttown does not have an easy life. Maybe that’s a given, when you consider that she’s seemingly the sole detective in a town with at least one outstanding missing-persons case and a fresh murder of a teenage girl on its docket. But there’s more to it than that. In “Fathers,” Episode 2 of HBO’s murder-mystery Mare of Easttown, we learn that her son Kevin killed himself. We learn that her grandson Drew has begun to display some of the same tics that Kevin did as a child, prior to his downward spiral. We learn that Carrie (Zosia Bacon), Drew’s mother, is filing for full custody despite living in a sober house after an unspecified drug or alcohol addiction. And everywhere Mare turns, she’s forced to confront old friends and acquaintances with whom she’s now at life-and-death odds, whether that’s the mother of the girl she’s failed to find, the father of the girl whose corpse she’s just examined, or the parents of the girl who beat the dead girl up on camera the night of her murder. If I were her, I’d pound Rolling Rocks like they were bottles of Gatorade the very second I got off duty, too.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

I see what Mare of Easttown is going for; with creator Brad Ingelsby’s workmanlike script, it’s impossible not to. Teenage mothers, dead-end jobs, opiate addicts, cancer patients, necessary but unaffordable medical procedures, chronic illness, the constant flow of cheap booze, old high-school glories substituting for any new real-world ones: This, the show argues, and not without reason, is small-town America in the year of our Lord 2021, or at least it would be if we weren’t still in the grips of the pandemic that shuttered the show’s production for a time. For what it’s worth, I don’t detect a ton of condescension in the portrayal. Ingelsby is a native of the area, and although the gap between Hollywood screenwriter and, say, exurban teenage mother is a big one, he does his best to paint everyone in a sympathetic, even noble, light.

Is it possible this is its own form of condescension? Yeah, I suppose it is. There’s something a little Barton Fink-y, a little “theater of and about and for The Common Man,” in Mare‘s portrayal of Easttown and its denizens. You can get as granular and gritty as you want with the talk of deductibles and diapers, but in the end, you’re still air-dropping one of the most famous movie stars in the world into this thing, and having her play a cop to boot. The very idea of a downtrodden but fundamentally good-hearted police officer, at this point in time…I mean, if you find it hard to swallow, I find it hard to blame you.

I’ll be covering Mare of Easttown for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.