Reality TV with A Difference

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4 minute read

Mare of Easttown finished this week on Sky Atlantic. It was a masterclass in TV drama and Kate Winslet will no doubt win a slew of awards for her portrayal of Mare Sheehan, a detective working in a town in the Pennsylvania commuter belt.

I was gripped from the beginning and not just because of the murder that happens early on. There was so much more to the show than the storyline driving it. It was nuanced, it was subtle and it was overwhelmingly grim. We were being brought through an America we rarely see on television.

We know somewhere in our minds that this kind of USA exists but it’s a far cry from the glamour usually presented to us. We’ve heard about the opioid crisis that has gripped almost every state, we read with horrified fascination of the outrageous cost of buying insulin or having a baby, we know that you can be fired at a moment’s notice and that most American’s are one or two paychecks away from homelessness and poverty and Mare of Easttown laid all of these things out.

The show is centered around women. Mare, her daughter, her best friend, her mother, her high school pal whose own daughter is missing, her other friend whose addict brother seems in the final throws of life, and Erin McMenamin, a teenage mother in crisis who is killed in episode one.

As I watched week by week it dawned on me that each of these women were breaking my heart a little more as we caught glimpses of their lives behind Mare’s investigation.

When we ask for more female-focussed stories we’re often given a Real Housewives franchise or a Hallmark TV movie to tide us over and sometimes sure, that’s what we need. But behind the TV Detective show premise of Mare of Easttown, we got drama verité in its truest form.

We watched women shoulder the burden of life. Suburban Pennsylvania may not be as relentlessly grim as the show made out, but it’s a universal truth that when things start to unravel it is the women who will fight tooth and nail to keep it together.

We discovered that Mare’s son, father of her beloved grandson, had died by suicide in the attic of her home. We saw his partner, drug-free now, return to take custody of her child and watched with sadness and horror as the pressures of simply trying to exist gnawed through her fragile sobriety.

Everything about Mare felt familiar. Her heavy walk, the sadness bubbling beneath, the exhaustion of dealing with young children, teenage children, an ageing mother and an ex-husband who lives at the end of the garden.

We saw women work hard menial jobs, we saw them turn to prostitution, we saw them be taken advantage of and to struggle, struggle, struggle.

It felt too real at times and too sad but also important and necessary.

This was TV about women and they weren’t glamourous or rich or successful or sexy or any of the other things women on the small screen often have to be. They were beaten down by life, trying to exist and surviving in a world that is not made to support them.

When Mare’s daughter is wondering if she should leave Easttown to go to college in Berkley I was willing her to go, saying out loud to no one ‘leave, go, escape that place, try and find something better,’ and when Mare told her she thought she should go, I know she was thinking the same.

But even in a nicer place, with more money, I wondered if the themes of her life would be hugely different from her mother’s? Because a wearying reality of women’s lives is that families, schedules, homes, and normality are too often held together by us, and what a heavy lot that is to wear across our shoulders.

The ending of Mare of Easttown was harrowing. I won’t spoil it here if you haven’t seen it. A lot of commentaries online was about whether Mare was right to do what she did in the final episode. People came heavily down on either side. And that struck me too. In the immediate aftermath of the finale, the commentary wasn’t about the murderer and the violence they wreaked on a young woman but about the woman tasked with solving the case. People were so angry with her for her actions and not with the perpetrator for theirs. Women, it seems, are always to blame.

If you haven’t seen the show, don’t let this piece put you off. It really is excellent. Kate Winslet is in the form of her life, she is magnificent as Mare, so too is Julianne Nicholson as Lori. But behind the drama and the crime is real life, in a way so seldom seen and that, even in its grey grimness, is wonderful to see.

I’m off to binge some Real Housewives now as a palette cleanser, I need a little fantasy after all that reality.