@Courtesy of Peacock

The new Peacock original series based on the best-seller written by Liz Moore is set in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where the opioid crisis is pushing too many women on the street. In one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city the police officer Mickey Fitzpatrick (Amanda Seyfried) is trying to overcome her personal issues and at the same time find the truth about some mysterious deaths that she doesn’t believe are caused by overdose. When her estranged and drug addicted sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) disappears again, Mickey is forced to face her traumas from the past in order to rescue her. 

The pilot of Long Bright River is one of the best television episodes I have seen in months. First of all the setting is precise and realistic in showing the degradation and the misery in which the victims of opioid addiction end up living. Even if the street scenes were shot in Brooklyn on the Broadway splitting Bushwick from Bedford Stuyvesant – I lived there for about ten years, it was way too easy for me to recognize the neighborhood – nonetheless the fictional environment is able to recreate that sense of desperation necessary for the atmosphere to work. The episode doesn’t try to make the reality of that dramatic situation more suitable for the audience, actually quite the other way around: watching Long Bright River you can fully experience such a social, economic and most importantly human struggle. 

It is always a pleasure to watch an actor being capable of completely understanding a character, and that’s what happens with Amanda Seyfried. The ability to portray Mickey’s inner life just using a very controlled body language, knowing that the woman needs to hold her feelings in order to contain all the psychological and physical burden she’s carrying on, is something that makes her performance absolutely remarkable. In the first episodes of Long Bright River the protagonist is by far the reason this series is highly effective, because as a viewer you can experience all Mickey is going through, and you want to know more about the pain she suffered in the past.

@Courtesy of Peacock

The first episode doesn’t reveal too much, on the contrary leaves the audience with the necessity of knowing more, understanding more about her. This is why, starting with the second episode, the huge amount of flashbacks beginning to tell us about her backstory is in the end quite unnecessary, if not counterproductive. They actually explain too much about a character that was so powerful because one could actually be empathic with her and keep guessing about her past. The choice to reveal little by little all that Mickey went through slows down the rhythm of the storytelling and, even worse, deprives Seyfried of the chance to work at her best to that slight sense of uncertainty about her role.

This doesn’t affect in the end the strength of her performance – deeply moving especially when she doesn’t talk too much or uses normal chatting in order to conceal what’s going on with her – but definitely makes Long Bright River less effective than it could have been. But when the psychological drama becomes more rhetoric, the detection plot starts actually building up, making the series still quite intriguing. The whole result about this Peacock original show is definitely worth watching, and it made me want to read the novel it’s based on in order to discover the similarities and the differences in this television adaptation.

Amanda Seyfried is an actor that in the last few years has shown remarkable acting skills when playing complex and layered characters. I am thinking about Mank by David Fincher (for which she gained an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress) but also First Reformed by Paul Schrader and the Hulu original series The Dropout. Mickey Fitzpatrick in Long Bright River can be acknowledged as his best piece of work, which talks clearly about the process of improvement she is going through. Congratulations. 

@Courtesy of Peacock

Rate: B-

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Here’s the trailer for Long Bright River: