Amanda Seyfried in Peacock Mystery

Everything is not sunny in Philadelphia on the small screen this week.

Both Apple TV+’s Dope Thief — review coming Thursday — and Peacock‘s Long Bright River set stories of blue-collar murder and misery against the relative hopefulness of the complicated relationships between their two main characters.

One of the shows starts extremely well, with its focus on that central relationship, but struggles in its second half. The other struggles through its first half, but resolves reasonably well once it makes its way to what was always supposed to be the heart of the story.

The second series is Long Bright River, which closes with two emotionally effective episodes that mostly hit their target, despite some over-obvious plot twists; a climax that’s a lesser version of the ending of a better prestige drama from last year; and a laughable moment in which somebody finally gets around to saying the series’ title. I got a little teary at the resolution of the story of sisterhood, addiction and choices, if not at the end of the murder mystery.

And if that sounds like it’s damning with faint praise? Sure! Nikki Toscano and Liz Moore’s adaptation of Moore’s novel is well-meaning, but bloated. You could cut the first six episodes of Long Bright River down to four with ease and down to two with the sort of ruthless efficiency that a story like this truly deserves in this format.

For the first episode or two, Long Bright River feels oddly like a spin-off of ABC’s The Rookie, with Amanda Seyfried playing Mickey, a Philly-raised beat cop patrolling her old Kensington neighborhood with Eddie (Dash Mihok), a new-to-the-gig 40-something with no understanding of the protocols or social niceties of the job. For her part, Mickey knows the name of every addict and sex worker, understanding that empathy is important to the job, or at least it can be.

As is always the case in stories like this, Mickey’s empathy isn’t naturally occurring. She has a personal connection to the drug users and prostitutes, because of years watching her sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) fall deeper and deeper into this world.

Mickey, who loves the English horn to distraction (the distraction of the show’s writers, not her distraction), has a precocious son (Callum Vinson’s Thomas), who doesn’t know Kacey exists and is beginning to wonder why he has no family other than his jovial, Yuengling-loving great-grandfather Gee (John Doman). It turns out that “the opioid crisis” is a complicated topic to spell out for a seven-year-old.

Anyway, things turn upside down for Mickey when girls from The Avenue start turning up dead at the same time Kacey goes missing. Nobody else is going to take the death of a few junkies seriously, but Mickey is filled with empathy and personal motivation. Looking for somebody she can trust, she turns to Truman (Nicholas Pinnock), a former partner who was hurt in some incident that might have been at least partially Mickey’s fault, though neither the incident nor the injury nor the thing where Mickey freezes in high-stakes moments is ever mentioned again after the first episode.

You know what is mentioned repeatedly? “Choices.”

Long Bright River loves a good literary conceit with little consideration as to whether such conceits play as well in television storytelling. The first episode features Mickey teaching Thomas about Faust (easier than “the opioid crisis”) and deals with the devil (she’s a strange, but very engaged mother). In a flashback to 2017, Truman gives Mickey a lesson on choice-making systems. Then characters spend the next seven episodes debating which behaviors are chosen, which are ingrained into our psychology or physiology, and mostly just saying “choice” a lot.

It isn’t that Long Bright River isn’t aware of the difference between literary devices and televisual devices. Director Hagar Ben-Asher, who also helms the fifth episode, introduces The Avenue with haunting shots of unhoused encampments and their denizens before showing us what life is like on the other side of the tracks by taking the camera over literal railroad tracks. OK. That was a little silly, but I actually loved that one of the first shots of Mickey and Kacey together features them on opposite sides of a convenience store fridge door, suggesting the literal sliding door of fate separating the directions their lives have taken.

The series is about two sisters, but for the first half of the season, even by splitting the narrative into a bunch of flashbacks, Long Bright River can’t find a way to make that relationship rise to the surface. The flashbacks are too clumsy, too obvious and, unfortunately, a bit poorly cast. I know that Amanda Seyfried’s distinctive appearance isn’t easy to mirror, but when there are younger versions of characters who have zero resemblance to the older versions, you’ve failed to form the connective tissue that makes the flashbacks worthwhile. At no point did I ever feel like the Mickey and Kacey in the flashbacks had anything to do with the present-day Mickey and Kacey. And you need to!

So much of the first four episodes is spent on establishing the largely uninteresting relationship between Mickey and Truman, who is apparently on administrative leave and has nothing to do other than lend Mickey a hand as she engages in an off-the-books investigation. I can’t say if Truman has a part on the page, but onscreen it’s like somebody decided “Well, his name is Truman, because he’s the only True Man…” and called it a day. When it comes to flaws, he’s a gambling addict and you think this will pay off in some meaningful way, and it does not.

Then there’s a whole episode — the fourth — in which Truman, a Black Philadelphian, and Mickey, a resident of a broken-down neighborhood in Philadelphia, spend almost a full hour being repeatedly perplexed by the idea of police corruption, as if it’s something new and previously unconsidered for them both. This is not a way to get me to respect two characters and their ability to understand the world around them.

I love prickly, complicated, unlikable characters. I’m less enamored with prickly, complicated, unlikable characters whom writers require to be constantly apologizing for themselves, which feels like it’s all Mickey does for eight hours. In the episode titled “Atonement”? I get it! But live in the messiness a little. Sometimes people just make mistakes.

None of this is Seyfried’s fault. Mickey isn’t supposed to be natural police, but Seyfried conveys almost effortlessly what might still make her good at this job within her discomfort. She’s got a sweet rapport with Vinson and her scenes with Doman are top-notch.

Doman, Philadelphia born-and-raised, lifts the overall level of Philly authenticity a lot, especially for a show that was mostly shot in New York and feels more “Urban Northeast” than Philly-specific. I liked a subplot involving Mummers. And I think it’s intentionally hilarious that in one scene, Mickey — Seyfried not doing any accent at all — goes to Thanksgiving with what is clearly the PHILADELPHIA side of the family, where everybody is all Delco’d out, talking about the Iggles and wooter and whatnot. I was less amused in one scene in which Mickey visits somebody and they ask, “Want a Tastykake or something?” What KIND of Tastykake? Sure I want a peanut butter Kandy Kake, but if all you have is a jelly Krimpet? Nah.

It makes a big difference when Cummings becomes a more active part of the series. She retroactively grounds some of the flashbacks in her wounded sadness and gives the entire story an undercurrent that the misery-porn treatment of the girls on The Avenue mostly hadn’t accomplished to that point. She doesn’t lift the show; she balances it.

It takes too long to get there. Too long to weed through red herrings and convolutions in the mystery that eventually border on irrelevant. Too long spent circling characters the show never bothers to develop, like Mickey’s best-friend-when-the-narrative-requires-but-otherwise-invisible Aura (Britne Oldford). Or the generally decent detective (Joe Daru’s Danjarat), whom you keep expecting to serve a purpose beyond “general decency” (though I guess if he did, there would be two “true men” in the story).

That Seyfried and Cummings are able to take audiences to any sort of satisfying destination is admirable and even rewarding. But not even they can make you forget how much better this too-long, insufficiently bright journey could have been.