Mare Of Easttown Illustrates The Problem With Too Many Procedural Dramas

For as gripping as it’s been, Mare of Easttown illustrates the problem with too many procedural crime dramas. The HBO Max series stars Kate Winslet as Mare Sheehan, a detective working in a small suburban police department outside of Philadelphia. When Erin McMenamin, a single teen mother, is found dead in a river, it’s up to Mare and her new partner, Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), to unravel the mystery and find the killer. As Mare investigates Erin’s murder, she’s given constant reminders of the other outstanding missing person case she’s failed to solve in Katie Bailey, another teenage girl in town who disappeared a year ago.

Throughout the first four episodes, Mare of Easttown built a complex story on top of a small town that held an inordinate number of secrets. Just about every main and supporting character had ties and connections to Erin in some way, not to mention to Katie. Over half a dozen characters have been suspected at one point of being Erin’s killer, or at least having a motive, with almost as many at one point possibly being the unnamed father of her baby. Even when episode 4 showed a mysterious figure kidnapping another teenage girl and dragging her into an abandoned bar, the entire focus of the show has centered on the townspeople and known characters as the potential murderers, with the heavy implication that Erin’s murder and Katie’s disappearance were linked.

Mare of Easttown episode 5 completely undid that, however, and in doing so, utilized one of the most overused tropes in crime procedurals: the red herring. After four episodes of Mare and Zabel chasing down leads among the townsfolk and sticking close to home, the fifth episode introduced Potts, a brand-new character, out of nowhere and swiftly revealed that he was the one who had kidnapped Katie Bailey and the other teenager. With Potts now dead and three episodes left to go, it’s clear he’s not Erin’s killer. Still, setting aside Zabel’s unexpected death, what should have been a much more cathartic moment of finding Katie Bailey landed with a shrug, revealing the underlying problem with too many red herrings: a lack of emotional payoff.

Red herrings are a time-honored tradition in detective stories, and on their own, they’re not an issue. It becomes a problem, however, when a series or movie, like Mare of Easttown, focuses on red herrings to the exclusion of all else and fails to connect a single one to the actual killer. When audiences have spent the entire time becoming emotionally invested in a certain group of characters, introducing a random character and suddenly revealing them as the culprit can leave viewers feeling cheated; they have no feelings about the character one way or another.

Though Erin’s killer is still out there, throwing Potts into the equation, revealing him as the kidnapper, and then killing him off all in the span of half an episode completely slowed down the momentum of the series in regard to the central crime. Oddly, that’s exactly what show creator Brad Inglesby was going for, saying in an interview with Thrillist, “I hope that structural shift really hits the reset button and the audience is like, holy shit, now we are starting over again in a way.“

The problem is that Mare of Easttown has been building momentum entirely in one direction and then the plot suddenly upended it to head off in a new, unearned direction. When that’s the case, it feels less like a clever twist and more like a series not confident it can hint at the real criminal without showing its hand. Erin’s killer will be uncovered, but with only two episodes left, it will be hard to regain that momentum and the emotional impact will be blunted by the sudden focus shift of episode 5. It’s not by mistake that the show led audiences to believe the cases of Katie and Erin were intertwined. Now Mare – and more importantly, the audience – is back at square one. In trying to be far too clever, Mare of Easttown simply abused the red herring trope and undermined viewers’ emotional investment.

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