Peacock‘s “Long Bright River,” based on Liz Moore’s best-selling novel and adapted to television by Moore and Nikki Toscano, offers audiences a much more distinctive tale than the typical murder mystery. The limited series, which centers on Philadephia patrol cop Mickey Fitzpatrick (an outstanding Amanda Seyfried), is a layered narrative about two sisters, an inescapable family history and a community doomed by poverty, addiction and negligence.
With a team of women directors at the helm, “Long Bright River” opens in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. A young, unhoused woman awakens in her tent and heads to the avenue to begin her workday. Settling into a car, she immediately realizes something is off when her John locks her in and speeds down the road. Elsewhere in the city, Mickey drives her 7-year-old son, Thomas (Callum Vinson), to school. The pair listen to a symphony and discuss its merits before she drops him off and goes to her job at the police precinct.
Later, with her newly assigned partner, Eddie Lafferty (Dash Mihok), Mickey heads to the avenue, where she speaks to the sex workers, many of whom she’s known since childhood. While Lafferty appears deeply uncomfortable in the neighborhood and his uniform, Mickey is at ease. She recognizes that she’s a safe space for these women, especially since so many others — including their families — have written them off. The day takes a turn when the cops learn that a body has been found on some nearby train tracks. When Mickey spots the dead woman’s long pink hair covering her face, she freezes and begins to panic. Though she hasn’t said a word to Lafferty or anyone else in the police department, Mickey’s younger sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), who also sports vibrant pink hair and struggles with addiction, has been missing for weeks.
Seeing the body disturbs Mickey to her core, and sets her on a path to find Kacey. However, amid her quest to locate her sister, more women who work the avenue keep turning up dead. The police initially try to write the deaths off as overdoses, but Mickey’s tenacity and persistence force the department to take a closer look. Sergeant Kevin Ahearn (Patch Darragh) brings in Detective Davis Danjarat (Joe Daru) to lead the investigation, but it continually stalls. Frustrated with the police’s lack of urgency and determined to catch the killer and find Kacey before it’s too late, Mickey enlists the one person who has never let her down, her former partner Truman Dawes (Nicholas Pinnock), who has been on leave since he was injured on the job months prior. Together, they uncover a haunting labyrinth created by cycles of disempowerment and despair.
As intriguing as the mystery surrounding the murdered women is, Seyfried’s performance as Mickey elevates this series. Adultified from early childhood and raised by her surly but well-meaning grandfather, whom she affectionately calls G-Pop (John Doman), Mickey moves through her life with an overwhelming weight on her shoulders. Her fears about Kacey, concerns for Thomas and what’s happening on the avenue are palpable. She has hardly had a moment of relief or true happiness. Though her actions are often profoundly frustrating, carefully placed flashbacks, beginning in the late 1990s and into the mid-2010s, allow the audience to understand who Mickey is and why she is skittish of everyone except Thomas.
The nuances of being the older sibling, and especially the eldest daughter of an impoverished, fractured or immigrant family, are beginning to gain more traction in mainstream media. Mickey, tasked with keeping her rebellious sister in line, never had the opportunity to be a kid. This state of being stunted her growth and her ability to open up and trust. In one of the most moving scenes in the show from Episode 3, “Mother Wolf,” a frustrated Truman yells at her for endangering herself and keeping secrets from him, saying, “You have a bad sense of who to let in!”
As Mickey and Truman’s investigation alters, shifts and changes course, more shocking revelations concerning Mickey’s lineage are uncovered, forcing her to rethink everything she thought she knew while confronting personal missteps that have altered her life. A beautifully structured series, “Long Bright River” is about sisterhood, connection and the truths often buried under deep-seated guilt and shame.
All eight episodes of “Long Bright River” premiere on March 13 on Peacock.
