By "From what you could see he looked like a ferret" is the description of a suspect which kicks off this new gritty crime drama from HBO. Detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) has been called to investigate the report of a peeping Tom creeping through the window of a resident of Easttown's granddaughter.
It might be played down as some neighbourly hi-jinx, and pale in comparison to the dark twists which soon follow, but drawing our attention to this case off the bat sets the scene of a drug-ravaged, deprived Pennsylvania county in which young girls are prey to shadowy men, and nobody seems to be taking it too seriously.
After the often flat drama of The Undoing, this show seems to have done more homework on its characters and the premiere episode slowly walks us through the people who make up this crumbling town.
Show creator Brad Ingelsby, who was behind the Ben Affleck-fronted movie The Way Back, has here brought to life another deprived town and a world-wearied protagonist who moves through the world with a sense of pain buried inside them. Winslet's Mare is cranky and short-fused, which we likely wouldn't take note of if it weren't so rare to have a female lead who doesn't care about being liked. Still, it's refreshing!
At work as at home, Mare earns the ire of her colleagues but seems largely unbothered, until she is faced with a reminder of an unsolved case: the disappearance of Katie Bailey. Katie's mother, and Mare's old high school friend Dawn (Enid Graham), appears on TV to call out the police department, and it's then announced that a county detective was coming in to assist with the case. Mare's reaction, that she doesn't need "some county shithead coming on her case", pointing out that Katie Bailey was a drug abuser with a history of prostitution, shows the torpor which has seeped into the case in a town where people have given up.
Easttown is littered with broken families, and this episode zooms in on single mother Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny) and her fractured relationship with the baby's father Dylan (Jack Mulhern), and his poisonous girlfriend Brianna (Mackenzie Lansing), as well as showing her relationship with her abusive father Kenny (Patrick Murney). Erin is verbally abused by all three figures, including a slightly overwrought incident in which the food she microwaves for Kenny is too hot and he loses his rag. Point taken, this girl has few people beyond her baby to talk to.
We then see further family trauma in opioid addict Freddie (Dominique Johnson) whose sister Beth Hanlon (Chinasa Ogbuagu) calls the police on him after he raids her house in need of money. Mare pursues him into his freezing cold house and eventually coaxes him out, no thanks to her new policeman, Officer Trammell (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley), who has some kind of bodily aversion to blood which doesn't seem helpful but which shows a softer side of Mare.
The most broken family however seems to be Mare's own, a sprawling web of children with absent parents and messy marriages, which is best worked out with a blank wall and some red string if you have them to hand. There's her mother Helen (Jean Smart), who feels like the critical voice in her head who happens to live on her sofa, her nice (too nice?) ex-husband Frank (David Denman) who lives across the road with his new fiancée Faye (Kate Arrington), and her resentful daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice). "Is there something you wanna confess?" she questions Frank after finding out he got engaged three weeks ago. What went wrong in their marriage isn't clear yet, but that's one of the friendlier moments around the kitchen table in this miserable home.
Nobody wants to come to Mare's ceremony, so she goes along with best friend Lori (Julianne Nicholson) to relive the glory of their basketball team decades ago. This sounds like something no town, no matter how sleepy, would still be banging the drum about, but it does give us an opportunity to see Mare come face to face with Dawn and show little sympathy she has for an old friend whose daughter has only been gone a year.
The title of the episode, which we hear repeated when Mare is being served in the bar later, brings to mind a legend who has never lived up to her promise, something Mare is clearly grappling with herself as she limps around town. A shot she made in a basketball game 25 years ago still sees her known as Lady Hawk, but that says more about this sad town than the shot itself, as she tells Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce), an author who lectures at a nearby college, when he introduces himself at the bar that night.
Later Erin is meeting a guy she has been texting at a party in the woods that night (cue deafening alarm bells), except she turns up and discovers she has been cat-fished by Brianna, who then proceeds to beat her up while a group jeer. Siobhan, who has seemingly now bailed on both of her parents for the party, comes to the rescue, but Erin pushes her off. We have seen how Erin has nobody to turn to, and now the guy she has been pinning her hopes on has turned out to be a cruel joke, meanwhile she's struggling with motherhood and unable to talk to the girls her age still in school.
After seeing her trailing along into the night, it's little surprise when the final shot we see of her is of her dead body, even if the sight of her naked and splayed in creek with a chunk taken out her forehead is fairly shocking. Now we have one missing girl and another dead, but whether there's any real drive in Easttown to get to the bottom of it is up for debate. Off we go!
Leads gone cold:
- Number one suspect: The window prowler might have slipped from our attention over the course of the episode, but hold onto that! So far the idea that Dylan or Kenny might be involved feels too obvious, and what's their motive for Katie's disappearance? Instead we'll put a red flag on the appearance of Guy Pearce's character at the end, because HBO dramas love a mysterious interloper in a one horse town. Also smarmy author turns out to be a creep when it comes to young girls, not such a leap!
- How good does a high school basketball shot have to be to be remembered 25 years later? Are we talking blindfolded from outside the gym? Because that is some legacy.
- The series is directed by Craig Zobel, of the brilliant film Compliance and the controversial, libs vs Trumpers movie The Hunt, who here turns what could be a prosaic whodunnit into more of a psychological and social thriller.
- Are McCains oven fries paying for that product placement as a makeshift icepack on Mare's ankle, do we think? Frozen peas could never etc.
- It's not clear yet whether we're supposed to believe the people who think Mare is bad at her job or at being a mother or wife, or if she's carrying more than we know. The lack of clarity over why Mare and Frank are caring for their grandson Drew (Izzy King) is definitely ground to still be explored.
- The show already seems to be circling around dead or missing young girls as a trope – so far, so true crime – but the series feels more interesting when it focuses on the forgotten people of a forgotten town and how people slip through the cracks.
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