The despair of Easttown
Crime drama hones tropes to perfection
The finale of the crime drama Mare of Easttown promises to be a finish for the ages. The series, with Kate Winslet an Emmy shoo-in as downtrodden Pennsylvania detective Mare Sheehan, will go down as one of the highlights of what’s already been a momentous year for television.
But if you want to win the game, first you’ve got to know the rules. Take an objective look at what makes Mare of Easttown so good — study, as Mare would, the evidence — and you find that the main reason Mare of Easttown is so special is that it’s so normal: it simply takes standard crime drama tropes and hones them to perfection.
SETTING
Small towns, ideally parochial and full of twitching net curtains, are the Petri dish for good crime drama. They come with secrets, mysteries, rituals and (sometimes literal) skeletons in closets. Not everyone has a clue about what backwoods Pennsylvania is like, which means that Mare of Easttown is able to feel deeply authentic while meeting the modern broadcaster’s demand for new, distinctive “worlds” that stand out in the slew of samey streaming content.
A MESSED-UP LEAD
Mare’s son killed himself, her druggy daughter-in-law is trying to get custody of her beloved grandson, her husband has left her, and she’s just so, so dog-tired. If only she knew that this is just par for the course in great detective drama. There has been not one single decent TV sleuth who isn’t “troubled” in some way, and with good reason — the tacit understanding from Sherlock Holmes onwards is that it takes one messed-up mind to understand another. The challenge is to get us to care about the person with all those problems. Mare of Easttown weaves the personal — Mare’s family travails, her love life, her psychologist sessions — with the procedural (the murder plot) to brilliant effect, so that you really can’t say whether it’s a character- or plot-driven drama.
A CHALK-AND-CHEESE PAIRING The introduction of Colin “Zabes” Zabel (Evan Peters), the strait-laced FBI investigator, as Mare’s partner in episode two was straight from the murder-mystery playbook. Hardy (David Tennant) had Miller (Olivia Colman) in Broadchurch. Rust (Matthew Mcconaughey) had Marty (Woody Harrelson) in True Detective. It’s mandatory not just to provide interplay between disparate characters, and the comic relief that can provide, but to highlight the difference between the small-town setting and the outside world.
A SIGNATURE... SOMETHING
It can be a hat, a statement vehicle or, in Mare’s case, a baggy plaid shirt, but audiences love a visual motif. It provides the quirk to set against the quotidian. Plus, an idiosyncratic whatnot is the perfect distraction from the fact that, ultimately, even great crime drama follows certain codes.
A DODGY PRIEST
Mare has Deacon Mark (James Mcardle), a quivering binbag of a man who, even if he’s not guilty of Erin’s murder, has undoubtedly been as guilty as sin of something from the moment we met him.
THE PREMATURE KILL-OFF SHOCK Popularized by Game of Thrones but now adopted by all premium dramas, if you want to keep your audience gripped, bump off their favourite character. Not Mare, obviously, but Zabel, who straight-batted his way into our affections, fell in love with Mare like we had — and then was summarily blatted. But given the sudden kill-off has become a trope, it has to be handled carefully — Zabel had just begun to be given a backstory and a character when he was nixed. We wanted more, and that made his end doubly shocking.
THAT’S IT, YOU’RE OFF THE CASE!
It is imperative that our hero hits rock bottom, and in general this is signified by the demand for them to hand in their badge. Mare was thus denuded after planting drugs on her daughterin-law. What’s important is that the cop hands in the badge and then gets back on the case, going against their boss. It’s Greek tragedy: hamartia followed by catharsis followed by “you’re nicked.”
THE DRIP FEED
In the age of binge-watching, one thing that great crime dramas such as Mare of Easttown have realized is the importance of making the audience wait. That translates as a return to good, old-fashioned, one-episode-a-week scheduling. It’s practically imperative for cliffhangers that hang, questions that tantalize, and the kind of theorizing and excitement that is at the core of any accomplished whodunit. If the show is good enough — and Mare of Easttown is — then the viewers will wait.