Roush Review: Crime Dramas That Will Make You Cry (‘Long Bright River,’ ‘Adolescence’)

Not many crime dramas can bring you to tears (ITV’s original Broadchurch the most recent standard-bearer), but two new streaming standouts strike an impressive balance between sustaining suspense and powerful emotion.

Peacock’s Long Bright River (eight episodes, all available), adapting Liz Moore’s terrifically gritty novel, boasts one of the most intriguingly imperfect heroines since HBO’s memorable Mare of Easttown in Mickey Fitzpatrick (Emmy winner Amanda Seyfried, The Dropout). She’s a Philadelphia cop who patrols the depressed neighborhood where she grew up and from where her drug-addicted younger sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) has gone missing.

Seyfried’s sensitive saucer eyes are our window to a dangerous, dark world that Mickey knows intimately, on a first-name basis with the junkies and hookers on Kensington’s mean streets. Her tragic backstory with Kacey, unfolding in flashback, provides a poignant framework for Mickey’s rogue investigation into a series of murders of forgotten women like her sister.

She’s also a single mom to 8-year-old Thomas (the remarkable Callum Vinson), a boy who yearns for family connection beyond his loving but curmudgeonly great-grandfather G-Pop (John Doman), a bar owner who comes from a long line of Mummers. The warm relationship between Mickey and Thomas, whom she introduces to the classical music she left behind to care for Kacey, masks a myriad of messy family secrets she’s reluctant to reveal. Mickey is aloof to those who try to interfere, but she grudgingly accepts support from her former partner, Truman (Nicholas Pinnock), who’s on medical leave, and a landlady (the great Harriet Sansom Harris) with a strong maternal streak.

The deeper Mickey digs into the corruption of the city and her own police department, the better we come to understand her demons of sorrow and regret.

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Long Bright River takes its bittersweet time to unravel its secrets, but Netflix’s immediately gripping Adolescence delivers its punch in four taut hours, with each distinct episode filmed (brilliantly by director Philip Barantini) in a single continuous take. The British drama never allows us to look away — even if we wanted to — as it confronts head-on the wrenching realism of a horrific crime, when in the opening minutes the police stage a harrowing 6 a.m. raid on a suburban home to arrest 13-year-old Jamie Miller (the astonishing Owen Cooper) for the murder of a female classmate.

The first hour plunges Jamie, his stunned family and the viewer into a whirlwind of clinical process as the boy is fingerprinted, strip-searched and interrogated, with his disbelieving father, Eddie (the wonderful character actor Stephen Graham, who’s also a co-writer and executive producer), at his side as the designated “appropriate adult.” A proud working-class plumber, Eddie says he’s never even been inside a police station before. “It’s OK to be shocked, and it’s OK to be human,” assures the court-appointed lawyer (Mark Stanley).

The all-too-human shocks continue into the second episode, set two days later, when DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) go to Jamie’s school to look for answers — and the missing murder weapon — and to try to understand the culture that may have led to such a dark act. Jamie again takes center stage in the outstanding third episode, seven months later, when a psychologist (The Crown‘s Erin Doherty) attempts to get inside the mind of the accused.

Unfolding like a blistering one-act play, this encounter shows Jamie at his best and worst: veering from charming and shy to confrontational and angry, unsettled when the empathetic professional prods him about his feelings regarding masculinity and self-image. “What you think is more important to me than what is true,” she tries to explain, as the session ends on a devastating note.

The final episode, jumping several more months, focuses on the Miller family as they continue to come to grips with the tragedy. By now, Eddie is a ticking time bomb of coiled rage, grief and shame, helplessly asking his supportive but shattered wife (Christine Tremarco) about the boy they thought they knew, “We thought he was safe, didn’t we?”

There are no easy answers, and no pat resolution. Adolescence is likely to haunt you for quite some time.

Long Bright River, Limited Series Premiere (eight episodes), Thursday, March 13, Peacock (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

 Adolescence, Limited Series Premiere (four episodes), Thursday, March 13, Netflix (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) 

From TV Guide Magazine

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