I’m afraid I’m very late to the party on this one, as Mare of Easttown was originally shown several years ago, but as it was produced by the same folks who are doing Task, which was partly filmed in my neighborhood, I figured I ought to give Mare a look.

I had tried watching it when it was first broadcast, but I got 15 minutes into the first episode and found it extraordinarily boring, so I gave up. Even on this second attempt, I found the entire first episode a bore. Who knew there were so many disagreeable people living in Delaware County?

Oh, wait. I know some folks from Delaware County, so I knew. But why put them on TV?

There has been this trend in recent years to try to make the detective as unlikeable as possible. Of course, writers have gone through the gamut of drugs and alcohol and wife beating, so now they try to see just how many laws they can have their detective break before the audience will lose sympathy. Honestly, I was ready lock Mare up and throw away the key just on principle. And that was before she planted drugs in the car of her grandson’s mother.

The series got a lot of attention for its accurate portrayal of the Delco accent which is a variant of the Philadelphia accent, and apparently Kate Winslet had difficulty capturing it. Truth be told, I barely noticed it, but I guess that’s because I hear it all the time nearly every day around these parts.

Once the characters and the mystery got established, however, I did find the series engrossing viewing, but it all fell apart for me in the final episode when the writer tried to be too clever and seemingly didn’t care that his clues didn’t add up.

Minor spoilers follow but if you haven’t seen it, I will not reveal the identity of the culprit.

It’s a long standing, well honored convention in whodunits (and I think Mare can be classified as a whodunit, just barely) that suspects and witnesses will lie and/or not reveal all they know, but when those suspects and witnesses are members of the detective’s family, the writer better give them them a powerful reason for withholding information. Sad to say, the only reason I can see for doing it in this case is to give Mare yet another reason to yell at them. As if she needed one.

During the confession, the culprit claimed to have taken the firearm and returned it the same night. But this would have made it impossible for Mare to discover the culprit’s identity as a) the old man would never have noticed that the firearm was missing, and b) Mare had previously deleted the video of the old man’s security camera for that night in episode three for no good reason, so she could not have seen the culprit returning the firearm. What were the writer and the producers thinking when they put together the final episode? It’s a mess and the whole thing just falls apart.

I suspect what happened is that there were multiple versions of the culprit’s confession, and somehow in the final editing the wrong one was used, because it would have been so easy to fix the problem. Just have the culprit say something like, “I was worried that you’d come looking for the gun so I went and put it back a couple nights ago.” 

So my opinion on the series is decidedly mixed, five reasonably good episodes out of seven. The first being boring and the final one just falling apart from a logical point of view. And oh, yes, without giving away the solution, I’ll just say that I’m rather tired of the particular trope that the writer decided to use. So it rather dampens my enthusiasm for the forthcoming Task.

I certainly don’t object to having the leading characters be unlikeable, but does every character have to be despicable? Is everyone a lying, stealing, conniving bastard these days? Even those that initially seem to be amiable?

I understand that the writer, Brad Ingelsby, had been wanting to set a show in Delaware County for some time as that was where he was born and raised. I guess he must have had a truly awful childhood and this was his revenge, as there are some truly terrible people populating his mini-series.

On the bright side, I did enjoy seeing the scenes that were filmed in the Wissahickon Valley, my old stomping grounds.