After Mare

What to do with the rest of our streaming TV lives? Quaint Location Crime Fiction

Mare of Easttown is over. Now what do I do with the rest of my life?

The seven episode series, which streamed on HBOMax, got mixed reviews at first. But if the series was for a cult audience, it was a massive cult. When we tried to watch the final episode that aired at 10 PM last Sunday on HBOMax, we kept getting "inaccessible" messages. My wife Maureen checked Twitter, and all over the country people were having problems accessing Mare, so it seems that demand broke the HBOMax bandwidth. I don't know if that's really a "thing," but it's a guess.

On Monday evening, HBOMax was still a mess: the closed captioning was ahead of the visuals by almost a minute. We were able to watch on HBO. Because of hearing difficulties accrued by both age and a lifetime of rock concerts, I wear hearing aids all the time, and I'm very happy with my small, digital Oticons. (This is not product placement, although I'd like it to be: I once emailed Oticon suggesting using my endorsement for ads in, for example, AARP magazine, but never got a reply.)    

The series started slow for us, and the first episode was a little dour. But for me, it was all about two things: Kate Winslet, and Quaint Location Crime Fiction. Did you notice how big Kate Winslet's face was on the screen compared to the other actors? The close-ups were meant to show the 45-year-old's imperfections, crows-feet, wrinkles, exhaustion, in keep with the character of a troubled  workaholic cop who gobbles hoagies and swigs too much Rolling Rock and Yuengling. This male's gaze still found Winslet alluring and captivating, and I couldn't keep my eyes off her, which would've been hard, because there were very few scenes without her.

What fascinated me most was the location in a small, insular town in Pennsylvania. Until the accents and conversations kicked in, I thought we were in Western Pennsylvania, the rural hunting grounds of Michael Cimino's 1978 Academy Award winner The Deer Hunter. But Mare is much closer than that: It is set in Delaware County, adjacent to Philadelphia. The Philadelphia International Airport is in Delaware County, so think of DelCo as Queens is to Manhattan. I've visited a few times: I used to go to 12-step weekends at a hotel near the airport, and one day for lunch drove into nearby Chester to buy a hoagie. It was dead quiet at high noon in Chester, and the row houses and empty streets in the business district, reminded me of Easttown.

And the accent: Philly accents are like microclimates. When I met my first wife Marjorie in the 1970s, she would occasional slip into her native South Jersey/Philly locution, as when filling the car with "gaz." The mode of speech in Easttown is similar to a Philly accent, with an overlay of hopelessness.

So for me, the big reveal was watching the "extras" after the last episode, in which Winslet and one of her co-stars, Guy Pearce, as her romantic liaison, the author and college teacher Richard, talking about their roles in their normal well-educated British accents. (Pearce was born in England and claims British and Australian citizenship.) And the actress Angourie Rice, who plays Mare Sheehan's daughter Siobhan, spoke in her native Australian. James McArdle, as as the accused pedophile Deacon Mark, is Scottish.

The actors' mastery of the extreme local subdialect is the show's great achievement, making it a masterpiece of Quaint Location Crime Fiction (QLCF).

This subgenre of streaming TV has been my passion since the concept was named in a meta-episode of Republic of Doyle, a Canadian series that ran for six seasons on the CBC, and which I streamed a few years in its  entirety on Netflix and Amazon Prime. (It's no longer free on Amazon Prime, but TV Guide says episodes are available for purchase. These things change all the time.) It features a father and son private detective team, Jake (Allan Hawco) and Malachy (Sean McGinley) Doyle, and is set in the city of St. John, Newfoundland. The Newfoundland rock group Great Big Sea performs the song that opens each episode. The Irish actor McGinley is one of the few members of the cast who is not a native of Newfoundland. Hawco, the creator, showrunner and star, grew up in this most distant northeast Canadian province.

I wrote about the show and QLCF in a few columns for the online high-end video magazine Cineluxe in 2020. https://www.cineluxe.com/tag/wayne-robins/. In season one, episode 10, to quote from one of the Cineluxe columns:

A pretentious Toronto-based crime novelist Garrison Steele (played with comic condescension by the fine Canadian actor Victor Garber) shows up in the Doyle home with the intention of writing a new book based on Jake and the Doyle clan’s peculiarities. “My publisher wants me writing QLCF. Can you believe it?”

A clueless Jake murmurs: “QLCF?”

“Quaint-location crime fiction,” Steele says. “He suggested I try Newfoundland. . . . The seafood seems passable, and you speak something like English, so I agreed.”

The first and  rule for QLCF is that the location is authentic, and that it play an essential part of the storytelling. Mare of Easttown is the rare case of American TV achieving QLCF greatness; another is the Baltimore of The Wire. But since I watch TV with closed captions anyway, I have no problem watching subtitled non-English language TV. I even teach a section of QLCF in the television part of my St. John's University course, Writing Music, Movie, and TV Reviews.

There's one streaming channel that consists almost entirely of QLCF: That is the MHz Choice channel ($7.99 a month). I had no choice but to subscribe at the end of season one of Captain Marleau when it was free on Amazon Prime, and the second season requred MHz. Now both seasons are on MHz at this writing. If you miss Peter Falk's Columbo, then Captain Marleau is a kind of reincarnation. Instead of a Columbo's raincoat, Marleau, played with gleeful lack of inhibition by Corinne Masiero, wears a trademark earlapped fur or knit hat known as a chapka.

She is called to solve crimes in various locations of France, from Alsace to Dunkirk. She is rude,which grates on some viewers, but I love her idiosyncracies: calling fellow officers "comrade"; making class-conscious remarks (when a local cop tells her there had been no serious crime for 11 years, she retorts: "What was it, a migrant beaten up by a fascist?"); she calls herself "ugly," likes to swim naked, is very music savvy, and likes to sing loud by herself. Also like "Columbo" shows, the guest stars in each case are well-known actors, in this series from France: Gérard Depardieu is in the inaugural episode.

If you're looking for real local color, try Capitani, on Netflix. It's set in tiny Luxembourg. The characters speak Luxembourgish, which sounds sort of German, but with French touches. Brittanica.com describes it as "a Moselle-Franconian dialect of the West Middle German group." Luc Schiltz plays Luc Capitani, who goes to a rural part of the country to solve the murder of a teenage girl. He teams up with a young local cop, Sophie Mousel, played by Elsa Ley. But Capitani immediately rubs the locals the wrong way, and not just because he is brusque: he is seen as an outsider because he is from "the south," meaning the city, meaning he's not much farther away than Easttown is from Philadelphia.

If you've seen too much of Europe, you might want to try Sakho et Mangane on Netflix. It's the mismatched dignified police captain (Issaka Sawadogo) and wild young detective (Khalima Gadji) in Dakar, Senegal. The sense of place is strong: Even within episodes, there are headers that identify the Dakar neighborhood. Some of the crimes are merely prosaic murders; others seem imbued with the supernatural, and much of the tension in the show comes from the tug between the ancient and modern in Senegal's capital. Some of the veteran police are acutely aware of this--their woman police chief, for example--as their identities as modern crime fighters sometimes clash with an in-bred belief system at odds with not just fact vs. fiction but right and wrong.

It's mostly in Sengalese French with English subtitles, but there are recurring events, a season long arc, in which some people cling to the old superstitions, and the police are sometimes more afraid of them than the traditionalists who speak in local, tribal dialects, fear the police. I've taken a meme from the show; when I don't understand something, I will say, as the young cop tells his boss when a native spiritualist speaks to them: "Sorry, I don't speak Wolof."