By: Alex Tilton

Realism in fiction is a choice. You can ignore it, worship it, or build your own but you can’t be inconsistent. But sometimes reality is so weird you have to tone it down or the audience won’t be able to take it seriously. And occasionally reality is so oppressively, grindingly sad that the end result simply isn’t enjoyable to watch.

Mare of Easttown flirts with this line from the opening of the first episode until the credits roll on the finale. The last thing I saw that was this gritty and depressing was All Quiet on the Western Front. To be absolutely clear, the show is a masterpiece. It’s on par with The Wire and Deadwood. But there were times when we almost switched it off because the misery these characters are put through is so convincing and relentless that it was physically painful to watch.

The show follows a small-town detective named Mare (short for Marianne). When the story starts Mare is already dealing with a lot of grim realities. She’s a grandparent at age 43, and she’s raising her grandson Drew with her ex-husband because their mentally ill drug-addicted son Kevin died by suicide a few years prior to the start of the series. Drew’s mother is a longtime heroin addict who has been in and out of rehab for years. Meanwhile Mare has to deal with attacks on her reputation by the grieving mother of a missing girl whose case has gone cold, and her ex-husband living next door with his new fiancé.

And this is our baseline. This is the resting level of pain these characters are forced to deal with. There are a few bright spots. Mare’s daughter Siobhan is an artistically gifted, kindhearted and hardworking student on the verge of going to college. Her home situation clearly forced her to grow up quickly, but she handles it well. Mare herself is very well respected in the community and much appreciated by the people she helps. But that’s about it.

With the stage set, we then have a murder to get the plot going. A young teen mother named Erin is found dead in a creek. The last anyone saw of her she was at a party in the woods being beaten up by her baby’s father’s new girlfriend… And it gets worse. A lot worse. Frequently.

The pain and suffering is (somewhat) balanced out by occasional moments of warmth and humor. In spite of the pain-bath all the characters are sharing this show manages to be funny when it wants to be. It also avoids all of my pet peeves. People behave believably; they never go inexplicably out of character for the sake of the plot. The characters do occasionally make bad choices that make the situation worse for themselves, but none of them are relentlessly stupid for the sake of manufacturing drama. Character motivations are clear and they follow through on their goals in intelligent, believable ways. The secondary characters have their own plots with solid arcs and all of them contribute to the main story. The people who made this show absolutely put in the work. 

Mare of Easttown also does some of the best misdirection I’ve ever seen. The tone is so bleak that you’re primed to believe the worst will happen, but then sometimes it doesn’t. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the characters catch a break, but there are definitely times when you’d expect the situation to get a lot worse and they manage to avoid it. Motivations and actions that seem clear at first are given new context later and their importance gets a radical shift.

There are several themes at work here. The most obvious one is protecting what matters to you. But another closely related theme is paranoia and the loss of trust. The murder that kicks off the show has a whole host of nasty ripple effects. False accusations, knee-jerk reactions, exhaustion, burnout, and re-activation of buried trauma all plague the residents of Easttown. Not everybody makes it to the end, and the ones who do have obvious wounds that will take years to heal, if they ever do. 

It’s one of the best done shows I’ve ever watched, but the situations the characters are put through could easily be too depressing for some viewers. Proceed accordingly. 

Image Source: Amazon.com