The
first time we meet Mickey Fitzpatrick in Peacock’s Long, Bright River she
is playing a recording of Faust to her son before he goes to his school.
During that episode her son Thomas (Callum Vinson) does his homework and
relates the narrative of Faust and what the story is about. (I don’t
know which version is so I can’t judge.) Later that day Mickey comes home to
find Thomas upset, she initially assumes because of bullying. Instead Thomas
tells her that he got a bad grade on the project because he got the
interpretation wrong – the one his mother no doubt told him it was. Rather than
admit she made a mistake Mickey tells her son that ‘stories are subject to
various interpretations and you can choose her own.”
And
that pretty much sums up everything we need to know about Mickey even before we
get her backstory in the series. One of her cousins has a blunter
interpretation: “Mickey lies.” We already know this after three episodes (the
number I’ve seen to this point) but Mickey herself would simply say that’s she simply
interpreting the world in the way she sees fit. What Mickey seems unable to
realize is that her interpretation has basically put her where she is right now
and that everyone else – including Thomas – can see the flaws in her façade.
It
may tell you everything you need to know about Mickey that she is portrayed by
that extraordinary actress Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried has been acting since she
was fourteen and with the sole exception of her breakout performance in Mean
Girls her gift has been playing characters who are wise beyond their years.
This has been true in particular in work for television, from playing Lily Kane
on Veronica Mars to her extraordinary work as Sarah on Big Love, the
teenage daughter who only wants to get out of the mire of her polygamous family
to her brief but memorable stint in Twin Peaks: The Return to her long overdue
Emmy winning performance as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. Her next TV
role was playing an investigator in Apple TV’s acclaimed The Crowded Room and
one could see her work as Mickey, a Philadelphia police officer walking the
streets in the midst of the opioid epidemic trying to solve a serial killer of
the ‘girls on the block’ combined with the search for her own sister Kacey
(Ashleigh Cummings) who has gone missing and cut from the same cloth. Indeed I
suppose some could just see this as the second season of Mare of Easttown we
never got.
But
there are key differences between the characters played by Kate Winslet and
Seyfried. The most critical is that Mare managed to at least be the position of
chief of police in her small town to acknowledge her sense of superiority.
Mickey has never managed to rise above beat cop and like everything else, it’s
not a position she particularly likes. We see her in early scenes with her mentor
Truman (Nicholas Pinnock who teaches her everything he knows about being a cop.
We also see him bust a girl with pink hair in a bodega and Mickey all but begs
her to let her go. It’s not until after he does it she reveals that the girl is
Kacey, her sister.
We
learn that Mickey went to college, trained as an oboist, and had to drop out
for reasons were not clear on yet but that we can assume had to deal with her becoming
pregnant with Thomas. We know that Mickey and Kacey were orphaned when their
mother died of an opium overdose, inflicted on them because their junkie father
got her hooked on the drug and left them behind. We know that Mickey was
basically the stickler for rules and clearly thought she was meant for greater
things – something her family genuinely seems to hold against her and she makes
no secret in their interactions that she does feel she’s better than them. We
also know that Kacey got hooked on opioids herself, struggled with sobriety,
and Mickey finally turned her over to the cops when she stole a piece of jewelry
that belonged to their mother. Kacey has clearly never forgiven Mickey for that
fact and Mickey has spent much of her life as a cop trying to look after her sister.
As of the beginning of Long Bright River, she’s been gone for two
months.
As
the story begins it becomes clear that there have been a bunch of deaths among girls
on the block. Ahearn thinks they’re ODs but Mickey believes their murders.
Almost single-handedly she managed to push the start of an investigation into a
serial killer, something that truly annoys her boss. And it’s clear by this
point in the series that even this investigation into the killings is just a
cover for Mickey to see if she can find out what happened to her sister.
Yet
even that is not the truth. During the opening episodes Thomas has been given
an assignment for a family tree something that Mickey considers ‘presumptuous’.
The only member of the family she has apparently let Thomas interact with is
her grandfather (John Doman) and it’s clear every time they get together that
she’s only doing it for her son’s. Gee knows this very well – in their interactions he ‘jokes’ that “she’s too
good for the likes’ of the people in the bar he owns. Mickey has lots of
cousins and uncles but she never lets them to interact, claiming her job gets
in the way. In the third episode Thomas finally erupts at her, saying that “she
lies all the time and that she never teaches me the things that matter.” Thomas
is smart enough to know that his mom has been lying to him for years and it’s
not because she wants to protect him from the truth but because she’s clearly
ashamed of where she comes from. After a Thanksgiving dinner with the cousins
(where Thomas is happier than we’ve seen him so far) he asks about the ‘girl in
the pink hair’. It’s now clear that for all Mickey’s determined to protect her
sister now, she’s never once told Thomas that she has one.
We
know that Kacey, at least in part, has been traumatized by the circumstances
that led to them being adopted by their grandparents and that was at least a
partial reason for what happened to her now. In the sense that Mickey is not
living on the streets or addicted to drugs she’s doing better than her sister
but her cover is clearly her sense of superiority and trying interpret stories her
own way. In her world she is the only person who can be fully trusted with
events and everyone around it can sense it. Her family thinks she’s above them,
and the people on her beat she’s trying to protect know all too well about her
own agenda. When Truman was shot, she clearly cut him out of her life and only
comes back to see him when she thinks she’s in danger. Even then she refuses to
tell him all she knows about what’s going and follows angles that nearly get
her killed without telling him. Her current landlady (Harriet Sansom Harris) thinks
she’s trouble and Thomas’s father is very much out of the picture. Mickey has
been able to survive as a single parent but she’s utterly unwilling to let
people in – something Truman finally calls her on when something so horrible
happens and she still refuses to open up about why.
This
is the reason that Seyfried is absolutely perfect for the role. She has always
had the ability to play performers wise beyond their age but for the first time
as Mickey she’s plays someone where that’s clear a front and one that everyone
else can see through. Truman tells her that she has to let the people who are
there for you in and cut out the people who keep letting you down. Kacey is
clearly one of the latter - Gee tells
her as much dismissively - but Mickey’s
guilt won’t allow her. So much of what is happening around here is clearly
bringing up painful memories and so much trauma and she has to this point
resisted telling anybody – even her own son – the truth.
Long
Bright River is
based on the best selling novel by Liz Moore, who is one of the head writers of
the limited series. Like almost every limited series adaptation of a book on
TV, I have gone in knowing nothing about it though I was aware of the book first.
The series is also being created by Nikki Toscano and indeed most of the writers
and directors for this limited series are female. Toscano has worked in TV for
a very long time, starting procedurals such as Detroit 1-8-7, the cult hit Revenge and her most
recent project The Offer for which she wrote six episodes is one of the
most highly ranked series on imdb.com. This is the first project she’s had
complete creative control over and shows the steady hand of someone who lifts
what should be a traditional story we’ve seen before in recent years and actually
tells what I can tear my eyes away from.
We
are coming close to the end of the 2024-2025 Emmy eligibility period and it
remains unclear what some of the major contenders for Limited Series save for The
Penguin, Disclaimer and possibly Monsters which got the vast
majority of award nominations in a period by and large dominated by contenders
from the previous year. It’s hard to know if Long Bright River will
contend – for one thing, it is on Peacock a relatively new streamer that has
yet to have an Emmy nominee in any of the major big three categories. But in
recent years the streamer has upped its game across the board and this year may
very well be its breakout for awards. Day of the Jackal has already been
nominated for Best Drama by every major awards group so far and Poker Face is due back for a second
season in just a few weeks. Seyfried would be a worthy contender and so might Long
Bright River itself. I’ll have to wait until the end of the series to make
my final judgment. But unlike some of the other major contenders this year –
particularly The Perfect Couple and Monsters – this is one I’m
actually glad I started watching early and can’t wait to finish. That’s the benchmark
of superb television.
My
score: 4.25 stars.
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