The disappearance or death of a child changes not just people but entire communities. There’s a sense that the year-old disappearance of a young woman in Easttown named Katie Bailey has reshaped the entire town. It’s certainly redefined the life of Detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), who obsesses about the unsolved case, and not only because she went to high school with the mother of the missing girl. Strained or lost relationships with children weave their way through much of Ingelsby’s writing. Mare also lost a son to suicide not long ago, making her the guardian of her young grandson, whom she now worries may have some of her dad’s neurological tendencies. Mare has another child named Siobhan (Angourie Rice) and an ex-husband named Frank (David Denman), who is about to get remarried. Mare also lives with her mother Helen (Jean Smart) and has a potential love interest in a new writer in town named Richard (Guy Pearce).
At the same time across town, Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny) is a young mother struggling to make ends meet and make the child’s father do his part to care for their son’s medical needs. Erin has an awful father named Kenny (Patrick Murney), who complains about his grandchild's cost on the family, and Erin just needs a way out. What first appears like a potential solution in the series premiere turns into something very different and a new mystery unfolds across the small Pennsylvania town, one that will bring in all of the aforementioned characters along with Lori (Julianne Nicholson), Mare’s best friend, a local Deacon named Mark Burton (James McArdle) and a colleague named Dan Hastings (Neal Huff), along with Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), an investigator from out of town brought in to help.
There’s such a strong sense of place and character in “Mare of Easttown” from its very first scenes that the project is instantly elevated above recent television dramas. It’s hard to overstate the importance of a world that feels lived-in like this one, and, while the production values are essential, a lot of that grounding comes back to Winslet, who continues to impress this far into her multiple award-winning career. She finds so many layers to Mare that other performers would have missed, imbuing her with the kind of sadness that shadows people who have lost a child while never dipping into melodrama. Her incredible talent elevates everyone around her, although great character actresses like Jean Smart and Julianne Nicholson are more than up to the challenge, and it's nice to see Evan Peters play a different kind of part for him and nail it. Every performance here works, which is a great credit to Zobel for tying these characters together in a way that makes the supporting players seem like actual locals with full lives instead of merely plot devices like they do so often in lesser mystery mini-series.
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