When Amanda Seyfried was on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” last week, she performed an incredible cover of Joni Mitchell’s “California,” playing the dulcimer and hitting all the right notes with her vocals, and my instant thought was we need Amanda Seyfried starring in a Joni Mitchell biopic titled “Court and Spark,” directed by James Mangold of “Walk the Line” and “A Complete Unknown” fame, and can we get to work on that, please and thank you.
It’s been a quarter-century since Seyfried started doing TV roles on soaps and some 21 years since she made her film debut in “Mean Girls.” She has displayed remarkable range as an actor on screens big and small, in projects including “Alpha Dog,” the “Mamma Mia!” movies, “Jennifer’s Body,” “Les Misérables,” “Lovelace,” “First Reformed,” “Mank” and “The Dropout,” the latter of which earned a Golden Globe and an Emmy for Seyfried’s portrayal of fraudulent Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
In the gritty and resonant eight-part Peacock series “Long Bright River,” Seyfried does some of the finest and most powerful work of her career, and will surely be in all the TV awards conversations once again. With Nikki Toscano (“The Offer,” “Hunters”) as showrunner in this adaptation of the novel of the same name by Liz Moore and Seyfried heading an outstanding ensemble cast, “Long Bright River” is reminiscent of “Mare of Easttown” in that it’s a fictional depiction of working-class Philadelphians that feels authentic to its very core.
Seyfried’s Mickey is a Philadelphia police officer who had great potential as a musician when she was younger, but sidelined those ambitions due to financial and family complications. Mickey’s parents were drug addicts; her mother died when she and her younger sister were children, and their late father was never in the picture, leaving them to be raised by their hard-nosed and sometimes flinty but goodhearted grandfather (John Doman).
In present day, Mickey is a single mother with a precocious 8-year-old son named Thomas (Callum Vinson), and she patrols the neighborhood of Kensington where she grew up, doing her best to look out for the young women who are sex workers, hooked on drugs and living on the streets. (Production values are first-rate, with New York City filling in for Philadelphia.) Mickey has a new partner in Lafferty (Dash Mihok), who has joined the police force relatively late in life and has a kind of unnerving sincerity about him, but she’s more trusting of her former partner, Truman (Nicholas Pinnock), who is on leave from the force and battling his own demons, but is always ready to lend Mickey a hand.
When a number of young women are found dead in rapid succession, apparently from overdoses, Mickey suspects there might be a serial killer on the loose, and she enlists Truman’s help in investigating the case and searching for Mickey’s sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), who has a long history of addiction dating back to when she was in her early teens.
Well-timed flashback sequences fill us in on the complex relationship between Mickey and Kacey, and the traumatic experiences that informed both of their histories. In the present-day sequences, there’s a hardscrabble realism permeating every scene, e.g., a Thanksgiving Day gathering where Kacey reconnects with her extended family, and many in the group are wearing Eagles jerseys and downing beers in the chilly backyard. (The women in this community are just as foul-mouthed and tough as the men. Maybe tougher, given all the s- – – they have to go through.)
At times, the reveals in “Long Bright River” are a bit heavy-handed, as when we learn the identity of a certain key figure in Mickey’s life, and we see this person in flashback sequences, just to make sure everyone understands who it is. There’s also one particular red herring that feels off and a bit forced. Overall, though, this is a tense and at times brutally raw mystery thriller that keeps us guessing until the enormously satisfying finale. Seyfried is nothing short of phenomenal as Mickey, who has the weight of the world on her shoulders and seems to want it that way, as if allowing herself to enjoy life would mean she’s lost focus on the only things that matter to her: protecting her son and finding her sister. This is one of the best TV series of the young year.