The pain you hold is not yours alone to bare. You are often told this, yet what if your job demands as much? What if day in and day out you are forced to stare at the deepest depths of human depravity, burying the forming void in you to go out again and again. You must be stoic, you must be impartial, even when it seems like the job demands otherwise. Mare of Easttown tackles as much, a Bostonian crime drama, with a ruff and tumbled divorced detective railing against a recent family loss and the harbored frustration from her precincts unsolved missing persons case, often brushing shoulders with abrasive yet personable types among the town she calls family. It is a tried-and-true genre, specifically the characterization of a detective dealing with the loss of a child, a la True Detective. While viewers continue to watch they may wonder what sets this piece apart from other beloved detective media, or if even being a genre piece it exhibits either exceptional characterization or plotting. Mare of Easttown doesn’t hit it out of the park, but it is still an absorbing miniseries which pulls you into the town and the local’s struggles.

 

Mare is divorced, living with her mother and daughter, while to her dismay the ex-husbands new home is just a stone’s throw away. On one hand for the price, on the other hand to be close to his daughter. It is the constant reminder of the crumbling marriage being a walk away, the constant knock of her son’s death, and the repetitive chants for justice right outside her precinct doors do we get the anvil weighted hurt bearing on her shoulders as she’s on the beat, responding to trespassing calls and thefts. Yet in all of this, the humanization shines through all the darkness through her relations with the town, sharing coffee with a lonely widower, consoling an acquaintance who lost her brother. Her ties to this close community keep her among the living, the town, her family, yet as someone later tells, her close ties may cloud her judgement.

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This ‘someone’ is new addition Detective Colin Zabel, brought on to assist on the persisting missing person’s case and the new murder of a local girl, to the chagrin of Mare. The performance of Colin Zabel by Evan Peter opposite of Kate Winslet’s Mare introduces the quintessential  detective duo as the clashing types buddy together to solve the crimes; the optimistic new eyes versus the ruffled old guard. To the delight of many, the two play off one another well in-between their scouring of crimes scenes and drunken celebrations at a bar. However, upon closer inspection the holes begin to show.

 

As alluded to earlier, the character and plotting can feel inconsistent at times, wavering to good, lacking, to outright hollow. Beginning with the led two characters Colin and Mare, the dynamic between the two unevenly shifts from clashing investigative ideologies to unforeseen romance, proposed by the young male detective as he asks her out on a date. He may just be there on assignment, to leave the job and avoiding the workplace grind of gears that may follow, yet in the moment, in the present with a missing girl and dead victim, the reasoning seems thin. As for Colin’s character, I walked away wondering exactly what he provided to the plot and investigation. For the most part it was Mare following up on leads and keeping up with the investigation. Colin felt, to me, more as just a foil for Mare’s character, a tool to disarm her and lower her emotional guard.

 

The crime investigation as a whole is serviceable. What begins as coherent, as characters reasonably respond to the growing number of missing persons an murder cases,

Slowly evolves by the end to a gelatinous stack of hastily tied threads and red herrings. It may sound quite harsh, and it isn’t as bad as it sounds, but the opportunity is there for better. A prime example is with the character Deacon Mark, who at one point in time is suspected by the police to be involved in a crime, and at one point is given a solo scene of an episode’s cliff hanger ending, seemingly implying a large part in the crime. Yet all in all, it led to nothing. The show in fact is riddled with those ‘cliff hanger’ endings to entice views to hang on their seat and play the next episode, to inconsistent effect. By the end, characters acted in confusing manners, disposing evidence on more than one occasion for confusing motivations, or conveniently waiting until six episodes in to reveal something they witnessed by episode one. And to add, the tone and themes at times misses the mark. At one moment there is comedic slap-stick music playing over the score as a comedic bit is played out between two high school love birds, and in the next immediate scene sex slaves are tied in a dungeon and taunted by their captive.

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​By the end of the show, I was somewhat satisfied, and would have been more so if the central messaging was effectively handled, with Mare’s arc coming to a decisive end. All throughout she struggles to process the trauma and move on, letting go, shown by the flashbacks of her son’s death and custody battle over her grandson. What felt to be the closure of letting go of her grandson to the rightful mother instead stops in its tracks. She ends up happy, solves the crime, maintains her friends despite stark betrayal, but was the growth worth the wait?​

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