The ghost of Kate Winslet haunts Peacock’s by-the-numbers new crime drama Long Bright River, a plodding attempt to replicate the Oscar winner’s small-screen success story Mare of Easttown. That show seemed like repetitive formula on paper but four years ago next month, it became the kind of buzzed about hit that TV execs dream of, winning over critics, audiences and Emmy voters. It led to the birth of a rotten new term used in industry boardrooms, the “prestige-ural”, a prestige procedural which would transplant high-end production values and an A-list lead on to material that had long been associated with churned out primetime network fodder.
So here comes Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried playing another Philadelphia cop who finds herself grappling with both the opioid crisis and the case of a murdered young woman which links to her own past and troubled family dynamic. It’s hard not to make instant comparisons but then Mare of Easttown was itself highly indebted to Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright’s sensational Yorkshire-set series starring Sarah Lancashire as a character so close to Winslet’s that it almost felt like a remake. With Long Bright River, we’re far from the gold standard set there, the show a familiar yet forgettable remix.
There might have been a more compelling take on Liz Moore’s acclaimed novel to be made, the book having received strong reviews upon release (the Guardian’s Stephanie Merritt called it “startlingly fresh”). But like many an adaptation in the streaming era, it’s cursed by bloat, the potential of a propulsive two-hour movie destroyed by an often punishingly misjudged eight-hour length. It’s a decision that the makers might justify by explaining how they needed to maintain the depth of character present in the source material, flipping back and forth through time to flesh out their protagonist, but it feels like another choice made for the sake of more content, more ads to be sold, as creatively it kills whatever force this could have had.
Long Bright River is trapped between the prestige and the procedural, having the big star lead and limited series length of the former but the cheaper budget and hackneyed feel of the latter. Seyfried’s career had sputtered out in the years before she nabbed her first Oscar nomination in David Fincher’s Mank but she’s since found arguably her greatest role to date as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, deservedly winning an Emmy and Golden Globe. She’s a little more lost here, playing beat cop Mickey who has remained in her impoverished Kensington neighbourhood, patrolling the streets she’s always known. She’s taken it upon herself to care for the women who haven’t been quite as lucky as her, falling into the murk, addicted to drugs and selling their bodies to survive. Mickey has another reason for this level of care: her sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) is one of them.
The plot kicks in after Mickey finds the body of a woman who she initially worries might be Kacey and it kicks off an investigation as to why more women are cropping up dead. Her superiors are content to chalk their deaths up to the obvious – the out-of-control opioid epidemic – but she’s convinced something more nefarious is at play.
From the initial scenes, of homeless encampments and sex workers scored to tragic piano, the well-intentioned yet clumsy tone of Long Bright River often feels closer to a PSA than a serious drama. There’s very little style or subtlety here (an emotional moment soundtracked by a song from Pink and The Lumineers should tell you everything) and while its very valid points about how those at the bottom of the food chain are easily forgotten and abused shouldn’t be undersold, there’s a smarter, more effective way to handle weighty material such as this. Much of Long Bright River is a slog and despite the baggy runtime, Moore and Nikki Toscano, the Revenge writer, are unable to add enough emotional weight to involve us in Mickey’s narrative, told in often confusingly interspersed flashbacks. Any grit that might have elevated it is softened by the cliches they can’t help but include – the no-fucks cop who doesn’t play by the rules, her precocious cute son who never once resembles a real kid, her handsome love interest who helps her crack the case – and so it just falls into an ever-expanding pile of shows we have seen before.
The extended length also removed any suspense or surprise from the plot, giving us far too much time to work out much of it by ourselves and while there are more interesting ideas and reveals in the final few episodes, they don’t forgive the struggle it was to get there. It also doesn’t really feel like the best use of Seyfried either, an actor whose conventionally attractive looks have often stuck her in milquetoast lead roles when she’s far better in weirder territory, playing a weather-predicting airhead in Mean Girls or a deluded con artist in The Dropout (her charmingly strange off-screen presence, as someone so obsessed with the word minge she had it tattooed on her foot, also suggests she would be better served picking more offbeat roles). She’s far too spiky for a show content with being so tediously flat.
Long Bright River is now available on Peacock in the US and in the UK later this year
