What makes Mare of Easttown work is how different it is from HBO’s glamorous, prestige murder story offerings of late

Vox

The Kate Winslet-led HBO drama is a stark contrast to David E. Kelley's Big Little Lies and The Undoing. "Nicole Kidman starred in both. But the shows also had more in common that just Kidman," says Alex Abad-Santos. "They were both about the glamorous lives of very beautiful, very rich women beleaguered by sociopaths, awful marriages, and homicide. Their privileged lives complete with plush homes, beautiful coats, and perfect handbags were part of the shows’ appeal; the women’s well-appointed kitchens, gorgeous fashion, and lives full of surreal opulence matched their degree of emotional terror and turmoil. Mare has plenty of terror and turmoil; not so much of the rest...Mare of Easttown wraps itself around its title character’s complexities and struggles, and shows how this case eats away at the thin walls that separate Mare’s personal self from the public and professional selves she presents to the world. Winslet is mesmerizing as she allows us to see the ugliness Mare is capable of and how obsessive, perhaps even abusive, she can be when she’s threatened."

ALSO:

• Kate Winslet admits Mare Sheehan is a lot like her: “Mare Sheehan is — she’s kind of disgusting,” says Winslet “She’s a hot mess most of the time, she doesn’t give a shit what she looks like, she’s kind of stopped caring what people even think about her… We made decisions creatively that this was a woman who looked at herself in the mirror when she brushed her teeth in the morning and would not look in the mirror again (all day). That’s just who she is. That’s like most busy mothers I know — that’s like me. It really is.”
• Winslet has gone full Pennsylvania by calling beloved convenience store Wawa "a mythical place"
• Read an oral history of Androgynous, Mare Of Easttown’s fictional DIY band, which was coached by Michelle Zauner and her Japanese Breakfast bandmates
• Angourie Rice discusses her role as Kate Winslet’s grief-stricken daughter