Mare of Easttown (HBO, 2021) is a seven-episode limited series set in a fictional Pennsylvania suburb outside Philadelphia. Kate Winslet plays Mare Sheehan, a local detective and former high school basketball hero who is investigating the murder of a young mother while her own family and community are quietly unraveling around her. What the show does better than almost anything else in crime television is hold both things at once: the procedural urgency of a murder investigation and the slow, accumulated weight of a life lived in one place too long. The accent is real, the houses are real, the dysfunction is earned. If you are here for the atmosphere, the character work, and the refusal to make anything easy, this list is for you.
Essential Mare of Easttown
The show itself, and the performances that made it land
Small Towns, Big Secrets
TV series where a community's surface hides something much darker underneath
Films in the Same Key
Movies that trade in working-class grief, procedural dread, and American communities under pressure
The Novels Behind the Feeling
Books that do the same work: grief-weighted crime fiction and literary thrillers rooted in place
Games About Guilt and Consequence
Games where the mystery is personal and the weight of what you find changes everything
Kate Winslet's Best Work Is on Television
There is a school of thought that says prestige TV drama peaked with antihero cable shows of the 2000s. Mare of Easttown makes a good case that it peaked in 2021 with Kate Winslet eating a hoagie in a car. Her performance is defined by what it refuses: glamour, catharsis, easy resolution. Mare is exhausted, defensive, and occasionally wrong. Winslet keeps her there, in the mess, for all seven episodes. The Emmy was deserved.
The Pennsylvania Suburb Is the Real Setting
Crime shows often use location as backdrop. Mare of Easttown uses it as character. The Delaware County accent, the row houses, the high school gym where Mare's legend lives, the diner where everyone knows everyone's business: these are not set dressing. They are the reason the murder hits so hard. A crime in a place where everyone already knows each other's pain is a different kind of crime.
Happy Valley Is the Closest Companion Piece
If you finished Mare of Easttown and wanted more of the same, Happy Valley (BBC, three seasons, 2014-2023) is the answer. Sally Wainwright's Yorkshire crime drama follows police sergeant Catherine Cawood across a career, a family, and a grudge that refuses to resolve cleanly. It has the same insistence on putting a woman at the center who is both very good at her job and not particularly easy to like. The final season is among the best television made in the 2020s.
Disco Elysium Is the Game Version of This
If what you loved about Mare of Easttown was the detective who is barely holding it together and the murder that forces confrontation with a community's real history, Disco Elysium is the game that does the same thing. Your character wakes up with no memory in a city running out of answers. The investigation is procedural; the damage is personal; the place has its own politics and grief. It is also very funny, which Mare never quite is, but the emotional register is closer than anything else in games.
Crime Drama Grows Up: A Lineage
- 1990Twin Peaks redefines what small-town murder mystery can be on television Twin Peaks
- 2002The Wire begins its five-season study of institutional failure The Wire
- 2003Mystic River brings literary crime fiction to the screen Mystic River
- 2007Gone Baby Gone establishes the Boston working-class crime mode Gone Baby Gone
- 2013Broadchurch proves limited series can do what procedurals cannot Broadchurch
- 2014True Detective Season 1 dominates the cultural conversation True Detective
- 2014Happy Valley begins its long-form portrait of a police officer Happy Valley
- 2018Sharp Objects and its Southern Gothic grief run on HBO Sharp Objects
- 2019Disco Elysium arrives and resets expectations for detective games Disco Elysium
- 2021Mare of Easttown airs and Kate Winslet wins the Emmy Mare of Easttown
More small town detectives and old wounds
Small Town Secrets
Explore the Small Town Secrets guide →The thing about a murder in a small town is that everybody already knows everybody's wound. The killer is never a stranger.CrossBinge editorial