Mickey Fitzpatrick is not like other cops. In fact, she seems to have little in common with anyone in her world. Played by Amanda Seyfried, with a disconcerting intensity that echoes her Emmy-winning portrayal of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, the protagonist of Peacock’s Long Bright River is a bright young woman and a talented English horn player. She was supposed to get out of Kensington, the crime-ridden Philadelphia neighborhood where she grew up, but only lasted a year at her hometown Ivy, Penn. Now a single mom to 7-year-old Thomas (Callum Vinson), she patrols the beat in Kensington, where many of the women she’s known since childhood are now strung-out sex workers, and practices her horn alone at night.
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In her loneliness and, paradoxically, in her peculiarity, Mickey embodies a recognizable archetype: the righteous female cop protagonist of a prestige crime drama. Like the conflicted women in blue at the center of Mare of Easttown, True Detective: Night Country, Under the Bridge, and many others, she is at once an insider and an outsider—too close to the people she polices because she has roots in the community but alienated from them because they have judged her to be fundamentally different. Like her predecessors, she will see the line between work and her personal life blur to nonexistence. And like them, she will be forced to confront corruption within the very system that employs her. Long Bright River, whose eight-episode season will stream in full on March 13, is neither a transcendent nor an incompetent example of this type of show. But in its familiarity, it illustrates the limitations of the popular fantasy that one extraordinary woman can right the entrenched wrongs of a broken patriarchal institution.
Adapted by showrunner, writer, and executive producer Nikki Toscano (The Offer, Hunters) from the best-selling novel by Liz Moore (also a writer and executive producer on the show), Long Bright River joins Mickey at an especially rough moment. Her ex, Simon (Matthew Del Negro), has abruptly ceased parental duties. She’s lost touch with her former partner, Truman (Nicholas Pinnock), who also seems to have been her only friend. And her new partner, Lafferty (Dash Mihok), an old buddy of her dismissive boss (Patch Darragh), would rather babble about his digestive woes than help the desperate women of Kensington. Summoned to the site of a suspected overdose death, Mickey freezes upon encountering the pink-haired, hoodie-shrouded corpse. In a bit of forced suspense, we don’t know for sure until the end of the premiere that she reacts this way because her younger sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), is an opioid addict with pink hair living on the street. Kacey has been missing for weeks. But the body isn’t hers.
As more Kensington sex workers are found dead, and evidence increasingly points to homicide rather than accidental overdose, Mickey becomes obsessed with two potentially connected mysteries: Who is the murderer? And where is Kacey? Could her disappearance be related to the killings—and if so, is she even still alive? But, true to its thematically ambitious subgenre, Long Bright River wants to be about more than just whodunit. In an early scene, as she ferries the precocious Thomas to a private school she can’t afford, Mickey plays the boy Liszt’s Faust Symphony and recounts to him the story of Faust’s “very bad choice” to strike a bargain with the devil. “There are certain choices that you can never undo,” she lectures. “So that’s why it’s really important to make good choices.” The idea that smart decisions are the key to a successful life recurs throughout the series, only to ultimately be challenged in a way that feels superficial.
The shoddiness of this thematic throughline is one of several relatively minor problems that make the show fall short of a standout like Mare. It’s excessively grim; a smidge of gallows humor would go a long way. It is, like most streaming miniseries, too long. While some of the twists work well, others are either easily predictable or too far-fetched to be anything but the red herrings they obviously are. The child characters, not just Thomas but also younger versions of Mickey and Kacey who appear in flashbacks, are inconsistently written, sometimes veering from babyish to mini-adults within a single scene in a betrayal of the young actors who play them. River is somewhat redeemed by the vividness and empathy with which it depicts opioid-crisis-era Kensington as well as the adult performances—notably from Seyfried, Pinnock, and Cummings—that bring rich detail to thinly written characters.
But in a TV landscape crowded with murder shows (River is, along with Hulu’s Deli Boys and Apple’s Dope Thief, one of three Philly-set crime series premiering within an eight-day stretch), its familiarity does it no favors. Though it foregrounds choice, contrasting the apparently good decisions Mickey has made with poor ones attributed to Kacey, then predictably flipping the script, this is really another story of a lone female cop charged with redeeming an institution that has been disgraced by her colleagues and superiors. Toscano and Moore reinforce the hopeful perception that such an outsider, one whose freedom from the cronyism and predatory impulses of the corrupt men around her is supposed to be inherent in her gender, can singlehandedly change the system, or at least be trusted to take justice into her own hands. “The force needs cops like you,” a high-minded detective (Joe Daru) tells Mickey in the finale. “Cops who care.”
For all Seyfried does to humanize her quirky character, she can’t save her from coming across as a trope. And it’s not hard to see why this trope has become ubiquitous. Detective dramas are more popular than they’ve ever been. Yet even as years’ worth of political backlash has drowned out calls to defund or abolish forces, perceptions of police shaped by tragedies like George Floyd and Uvalde aren’t so easily forgotten. If characters like Mickey and Mare and Night Country’s Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) are overrepresented on TV, maybe it’s because they help justify the persistence of cop shows at a time when viewers inclined to root for strong female leads may not see the typical police officer as a hero.