When an A-list star headlines a streaming series, the expectations of the viewers inevitably are increased. After all, the thought goes, this A-lister wouldn’t commit to eight episodes of a story unless they think it’s a pretty good script. That’s why it’s all the more remarkable when we watch the show starring the A-lister and find that, while the actor does a good job, the story itself isn’t all that compelling.
LONG BRIGHT RIVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman, sleeping in a tent with her boyfriend, looks out and sees trees. She kisses him, unzips the tent, and we then see that they’re living on the streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. She gets into a red pickup truck in order to make some money; when the driver locks, the door, she starts to scream.
The Gist: We first see Michela “Mickey” Fitzpatrick (Amanda Seyfried) taking her son Thomas (Callum Vinson) to school; she’s playing classical music and asking the precocious 8-year-old about what instruments he hears and what the performance feels like. She then goes to work at the Philadelphia Police Department.
She works the beat in Kensington, where she grew up. With her new partner, 45-year-old rookie Eddie Lafferty (Dash Mihok), she identifies each of the women who live on the street due to opioid and other addictions. It’s what her former partner, Truman Dawes (Nicholas Pinnock) did when she started working the beat in 2017.
When they get a call about a possible OD, Mickey panics when she sees the dead woman has purple hair. She flashes back to finding Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), a woman she knows, lying unconscious, and she and Truman reviving her. Then we flash back to 2017, when Mickey first started on the beat; Kacey is arrested trying to shoplift a birthday card for a 1-year-old, and the same sense of panic comes over Mickey, to the point where she pleads with Truman to let the girl go.
More bodies like the woman Mickey and Eddie found are turning up in the morgue, dismissed by her commander, Sergeant Kevin Ahearn (Patch Darragh) and officers like Eddie as junkies who died of overdoses. But, like the first body, Mickey sees evidence that these women may have been murdered. When she goes to talk to the boyfriend of one of the women killed, she learns about the red pickup. What she also finds out is that she’s seen the pickup before.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Liz Moore and Nikki Toscano based on Moore’s novel of the same name, Long Bright River gives off strong Mare Of Easttown vibes.
Our Take: While watching Long Bright River, we got the nagging feeling that the show is trying to be more than it is. What do we mean by that? Well, the show sets itself up as a flashback-laden psychological examination of how Mickey’s varied experiences help and hurt her as she looks into the deaths of these woman and tries to find Kacey. But, in reality, the show is more or less a murder-mystery police procedural thriller. And in striving to be the first thing, the show stumbles in just doing the basics of being the second.
Let’s talk about Kacey for a second. Moore and Toscano are cagey about how Mickey knows her, but eventually reveal it near the end of the episode when Mickey tells Truman why she wants him to let her go. That’s not the only think they’re cagey about; Mickey tells Eddie that she’s had a “couple of careers” before becoming a cop; we find out that she spent a year at Penn; we also get the feeling that Thomas is not her biological child, and that they’ve moved around a lot. There is a lot going on with Mickey’s past that we don’t know about yet, and it will all help her convince her superiors to take the deaths of these women more seriously.
But the cageyness isn’t feeling organic, earned or authentic. It wasn’t hard to figure out how Mickey and Kacey are connected, and other aspects of the first episode seemed either predictable or what we’ve seen from scores of British and Nordic noir thrillers. There seem to be other aspects of the story, like Truman leaving the PPD after something Mickey reported, that may or may not get the time they deserve. Plus, the first episode had a number of scenes where Mickey is talking to Thomas about Proust that we hope ties in somewhere down the line.
That’s not to say that Seyfried’s performance isn’t worth watching. We can tell that Mickey has a troubled past, and that she’s reluctant to reveal much about it. Seyfried does a good job conveying the fact that the intense Mickey has those secrets. But what we wonder is if Seyfried, and to a lesser extent, Pinnock, are giving their usual great performances in the service of a story that’s pretty pedestrian.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: We find out where Kacey is, and if she’s still alive.
Sleeper Star: Two veteran actors got our attention: Harriet Sansom Harris as Mickey’s warm but wary landlady Mrs. Mahon, and John Doman as Mickey’s gruff but loving father.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You know why I don’t tell you anything? You got your answer,” Mickey tells Eddie after he expresses the notion that some of the junkies Mickey tries to help might be better off ODing than continuing to live their lives they way they do.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Between Seyfried’s performance and the bread crumbs we get about Mickey’s past in the first episode, there’s enough to keep us watching Long Bright River. But we can’t shake the feeling that, without Seyfried in the mix, the show would be indistinguishable from other procedurals of its type.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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