Long Bright River is a new thriller drama series streaming on Peacock that has been adapted from contemporary American novelist Liz Moore’s book by the same name. The eight-part series, with each episode roughly an hour long, follows a police officer named Mickey as she finds herself in an uncomfortable and challenging situation. Her precinct sees the mysterious deaths of three women, whose questionable decisions in life and long history of drug abuse mean that most officers do not care to find out exactly what happened to them. But to Mickey, these women are childhood friends and acquaintances, with whom she grew up together, and so she is determined to bring some justice to them. Briefly put, Long Bright River is thrilling and moving in equal parts and is absolutely worth a watch for those interested in the crime thriller genre.
Long Bright River begins with the protagonist, Mickey Fitzpatrick, dropping her young son, Thomas, off at school before getting on with her daily schedule of patrolling the streets to maintain law and order. Mickey is a police officer by profession, and she has a close connection with the neighborhood of Kensington, which happens to be one of the most crime-riddled areas in the city of Philadelphia, since it was on these very streets that she grew up. On this particular day, Mickey drives around the neighborhood with her new beat partner, Eddie Lafferty, who is not very impressed by her affinity towards the place and its people. It is rather odd to Eddie that Mickey knows each of the sex workers in the neighborhood, who also happen to be addicts and therefore the biggest miscreants, for he believes that she should have moved past her roots after having established a good and ‘clean’ life for herself. Mickey, on the other hand, is not impressed by her partner’s judgmental and somewhat insensitive remarks and makes it obvious that it is because of his nature that she cannot really open up to him about her life.
Soon, the officers are alerted about the dead body of a woman having been found by the nearby rail tracks, and as they happen to be the closest officers to the place, the duo respond to it first. Seeing a glimpse of the dead body, specifically the pink-dyed hair of the woman, makes Mickey stop in her tracks and leaves her completely shaken for a few minutes straight, almost as if she knows the victim personally. Once the body is moved and her face revealed, though, Mickey almost breathes a sigh of relief, although she is still gutted by the death of the woman. As the police unit launches a half-hearted investigation into the death of the woman, who is identified as a prostitute from Kensington, Mickey grows determined to prove that she did not die from an overdose but due to some other mysterious reason. Her suspicions are confirmed when the autopsy reveals that the woman had been killed by having insulin injected into her body, and two more bodies eventually show up in just a few days’ time.
While the thriller plot, with the opioid crisis at its center, remains one of the key focuses in Long Bright River, it is also intricately about the complicated relationship between two sisters and their vastly different situations in life. As is revealed soon enough, Mickey’s reaction at seeing the victim’s pink hair was because of the fact that her sister, Kacey, has similar dyed hair, and so she feared that it might be Kacey who had died. Despite not having been in touch for a couple of years, Mickey sets out to also find her sister, who does not have a settled life like hers as she is a helpless victim to addiction and the vices related to it. As the sex workers keep dying one after another, the protagonist believes that her sister is in trouble as well, which makes her take desperate measures, only to uncover a series of shocking truths.
Despite essentially being a crime thriller, the series does a solid job of making itself about a broken family and its members as well, which gives the characters an enjoyable depth. Mickey has her own past, during which she made some decisions that she still regrets, or at least questions. All she can do at present is teach her young son about the importance of choices and decisions and also about actions having consequences. Although the theme of good and evil keeps appearing repeatedly, the concepts are not so plain or simple in the real world as in a child’s mind. Those mostly representing all that is good and right, including Mickey, have had their fair share of mistakes as well. Similarly, the antagonists are also somewhat given their space to express themselves, and while we as viewers obviously make judgments against them (and rightly so), Long Bright River does not paint its characters in complete black and white.
The city of Philadelphia as it is presented in the series comes across as a living, breathing space and not just a backdrop to a crime story, entirely because of the characters. The effects of drug abuse, not just on one’s personal and social lives, but also on those related to them, and even how it can affect one’s children in a very direct, and therefore helplessly concerning, way, all find their place in the series, despite it never taking the preachy route. Most of the credit for this is perhaps due to Liz Moore, whose novel is adapted for the screen here, although I am not personally acquainted with her novel, “Long Bright River.” By the end, the thriller plot is not as shocking or twist-laden as some modern shows tend to be, and its relatively happy ending might not be to everyone’s taste as well. But the way the series tells its story and also rounds it up is convincing and moving, to say the least.
A lot of the credit is due to the actors as well, including (but not limited to) Amanda Seyfried as Mickey and Ashley Cummings as Kacey, respectively. Young Callum Vinson’s performance also deserves a mention, as he plays the sensitive and sometimes quirky Thomas quite brilliantly. The style of editing here is a bit slower than is typical of the genre, which made it slightly more enjoyable for me, although the cinematography was nothing out of the ordinary. The music is adequately handled as well, including a scene in the very last episode where Mickey makes up her mind for a tough confrontation with Mozart’s composition playing intensely in the background, and although it seems a bit stretched, the music actually does work in the scene. Overall, Long Bright River might not be noteworthy enough to stand the tests of time, but it still makes for an equal-parts entertaining and moving watch.
