MARE OF EASTTOWN

Neon, from Wednesday

Sometimes the place a TV series or movie is set is almost like a character in itself, and sometimes that character is a massive down-buzz. The small Pennsylvania town where the new HBO crime drama Mare of Easttown is set is a classic example. This might be the coldest, bleakest place we’ve seen on screen since Manchester by the Sea.

Easttown is where Kate Winslet’s character Mare Sheehan grew up and still lives. In high school she was a basketball sensation, whose jersey still hangs on the wall of the gym. Now she’s the town’s detective and fits almost all the usual gritty small-town detective cliches, with the one concession to modernity being that she vapes instead of smoking.

And she vapes quite a lot, because her life is quietly and slowly falling apart. If it’s not difficult family stuff to deal with at home, it’s an old lady calling her on her cellphone at the crack of dawn to report a prowler disturbing the bins. Then there’s the year-old cold case her boss wants her to go back on and reopen the file, because the missing woman’s mum keeps going on the news and making them look bad.

That’s not the main grisly crime at the centre of this series, though — that comes a bit later, after we’ve already followed Mare around and got to meet some of the Easttown locals. In most series, you sit through this type of exposition impatient to get to the big murder mystery moment. But if the whole series was just Kate Winslet huffing about in heavy flannel overshirts trying to avoid getting involved in other people’s problems, it’d still be worth watching.

Not many shows are so good that you almost wish less would happen. Led by a career standout performance from Winslet, Mare of Easttown is one of them.