‘Long Bright River’ Review: Amanda Seyfried Pushes the Envelope in Peacock’s Bingeable Mystery

The talented Amanda Seyfried (“The Dropout”), the thinking woman’s beauty, joins the hard-working, blue-collar women of crime. “Long Bright River,” the gritty Peacock limited series of eight bingeable episodes, follows in the sensible flats of investigative reporter Amy Adams in “Sharp Objects” and Jodie Foster in “True Detective: Night Country.” Please, don’t ask these women to smile.

Mickey Fitzpatrick (Seyfried), amateur English horn player and Penn dropout, is an unlikely beat cop in the rough Kensington area of Philadelphia where she grew up. It’s a low-income, working-class neighborhood with a strong Irish American community derailed by deindustrialization in the 1960s.

On the Philly streets, women — sex workers and drug addicts — are turning up dead. Bagged and tossed, the predominantly male authorities remain staunchly unbothered. These overdose victims, in their eyes, got what they bargained for, what they deserved. Garbage in, garbage out.

But single mom Mickey, who is raising her precocious youngster Thomas (Callum Vinson) in the old neighborhood near the grandfather that raised her (the great utility player John Doman, “Gotham’s” Carmine Falcone), sees the situation differently. She knows these women. She knows their struggles with opioids and addiction, a battle that the audience will discover has defined her life, limited her opportunities and left her scarred. This is murder, whether by a single individual, a serial killer hiding in plain sight or a society incapable of caring for its addicted daughters, preyed on by impoverished sons.

Her pink-haired younger sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) has been living on the streets ever since Mickey tossed her out of her house for relapsing yet again. Now, Kacey’s missing. Nobody seems to care, not even their grandfather. Even Mickey herself is weary of worrying, of being the responsible one, of keeping everyone’s shit together, including her own. This can make her appear brittle, melancholy and reserved — even haughty — to outsiders. But she can’t stop her need to rescue, and her own burden of guilt for not protecting the sister she loves but may not be able to save.

She knows these souls, went to school with some, and the bodies of the overdosed and abandoned keep turning up in the tent cities and beneath the bridges of the City of Brotherly Love. Why investigate? She can’t let these crimes go unresolved. And, since Kacey is only missing, not yet dead, the cop’s racing against the clock even as her fellow policemen roll their eyes, dismissing her impossible (and unsanctioned) quest.

Like Gillian Flynn’s crime thriller “Sharp Objects,” the source of “Long Bright River” is a novel, the 2020 women’s book club fiction penned by Liz Moore. As a side note, the bestseller’s Amazon page includes the sentence most highlighted by Kindle readers: “Every grown woman I knew had a job — or, more often, multiple jobs. About half of the men did.”

Moore executive produced and co-wrote the series, working in tandem with showrunner Nikki Toscano. Seyfried herself served as an executive producer. The struggle to remain true to the rich character study and sense of place found in the novel, while transforming it into an edge-of-the-seat shocker, isn’t always seamless.

The episodes each stick their landings, ending in shocking cliffhangers that push you to keep the binge going. Although sometimes the arc of single episodes seems forced to bend to the format’s will. There is so much that a novel can do with its direct connection to the reader that episodic TV cannot. The constant revelations of past horrors — family secrets, addiction’s generational legacy, paternity revealed, maternity exposed, the grooming of minors, to name a few — can feel compressed and oppressive.

In the novel and series, the narrative pendulums in time. These shifts can stall the flow with clunky, indigestible sequences complicated by multiple actresses playing Mickey and Kacey at varying ages. Wonderful touches, like the grandfather’s involvement in the Philadelphia Mummers — a subculture unique to the area with an annual parade launched in 1901 and still thriving — gives the series texture but lacks the potential dramatic payoff. At times, big revelations don’t get enough air to breathe and, if a viewer doesn’t watch it all in one big gulp, the time shifts can be disorienting.

Seyfried, with her large, luminous eyes ever alert and often red-rimmed, holds it all together, playing a compelling and original character lugging baggage that would topple a lesser woman. The surrounding powerhouse cast includes the magnetic Nicholas Pinnock, as Mickey’s former crime-fighting partner (they have history!) and potential love interest, the empathetic child actor Vinson, the tough heartbreaker Cummings and journeyman Doman playing a good guy for a change.

There are some awkward bends in this “Long Bright River,” but with its strong sense of place, sequences of ride-along policing and twisted sisters storyline, it’s a must for lovers of female-driven dysfunctional family crime dramas.

“Long Bright River” premieres Thursday, March 13, on Peacock.

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