‘Long Bright River’: Amanda Seyfried Gets Her Own ‘Mare of Easttown’ Show

Amanda Seyfried is not the type of face you think of when you picture a hardened Philadelphia cop. A French orphan whose world is upended by revolution, or a bride-to-be who sneakily invites the three men who could be her father to her sunny Greek island wedding, sure, but a steely-eyed inner-city patrol cop on the heels of a murder investigation is new territory.

Peacock’s Long Bright River, based on Liz Moore’s bestselling 2020 novel, tests the limits of both Seyfried’s dramatic capacity and the crime limited series as a format, and mostly succeeds—though it takes a while to get where it’s supposed to go.

Seyfried stars as Mickey, a police officer who patrols the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, keeping eyes on the familiar faces who live on the street, learning their names and generally caring about their wellbeing where most other cops would turn a blind eye.

She’s estranged from her younger sister Casey (Ashleigh Cummings), who started abusing substances as a young teen and has been in and out of rehab ever since. Mickey knows she can only do so much to help her, but when Casey disappears in the middle of a string of murders targeting other homeless women in the area, Mickey is determined to get to the bottom of it, and soon finds out her connection to the case goes deeper than she thought.

It’s a hooky plot, though there’s not much there on the surface to set it apart from other shows of this type. There’s a police chief who constantly undercuts our hero’s ambitions, a former partner with whom Mickey shares a complicated relationship, and an absent father who refuses to pay child support for her young son. The show attempts to sidestep this issue by giving its main characters little details to round them out—Mickey, for example, plays the oboe and loves opera, delighting in explaining the grimdark plots of Faust and Tristan and Isolde to her son (Callum Vinson). There’s a sheen of inspiration over most of the more ho-hum aspects that keeps things interesting.

That sheen is especially useful when deployed in the early half of the series, which, like its source material, is markedly slow. The first two or three episodes especially feel like they could have been condensed, if only so the show didn’t feel like it was repeating scenes over and over.

Mixed in with all the fits and starts of Mickey’s budding investigation are lengthy flashbacks to her childhood with her sister, tracking Casey’s descent into addiction in the shadow of Mickey’s academic and extracurricular ambitions. The two are presented as nearly twins as children and opposites in adulthood: adult Casey colors her hair hot pink, while Mickey keeps her blond locks in a regulation low bun. It becomes clear as the show goes on that Mickey and Casey’s fractured relationship is the main driving force behind the rest of the plot, and a little bit of childhood flashback here and there goes a long way.

Things gradually get more exciting in the back half of the season, as Mickey reconnects with her former partner Truman (Nicholas Pinnock) and the two start investigating together, getting closer and closer to finding answers. Their chemistry is strong enough for the show to ride on in the moments between grave revelations, and those revelations provide enough excitement to make those plodding early episodes worth watching. You can forgive clunky, cliché lines like “he likes control, that’s his favorite vice” when they’re muttered in the chewed-up Philly accents that were so delightful in HBO’s (quite similar) crime miniseries Mare of Easttown.

The end result is worth watching, but maybe not as grandly prestige-y as it hopes to be. Long Bright River is not breaking any new ground when it comes to the inner-city cop drama following a rule-breaking officer with a complicated past, but the deliberate pacing out of its big reveals promises new shockers around every corner.