New series you’ll be obsessed with

It might not look like much on the surface, but Kate Winslet’s gritty new show is being touted as one of the best crime series in recent times.

You might not watch the trailer for Mare of Easttown and immediately think, “Oh, this gloomy Kate Winslet detective drama is going to be HBO’s next big hit,” and yet that’s precisely what is should be.

After a string of gritty thrillers and star-studded limited series, HBO might have stumbled upon everyone’s next weekly obsession.

Mare of Easttown hooks you from the jump with a rare mix of humanity and grisly murder mystery.

As the show progresses, it only gifts viewers more brilliant character moments, shocking reveals, and haunting performances.

Clear your Mondays for new episodes of Mare of Easttown, which drop locally on Binge from Monday, April 19, because it’s that damn addicting.

I am obsessed and you, your mum, and everyone you know who loves crime dramas will be, too.

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Kate Winslet is superb in Mare of Easttown. Picture: BINGE

Mare of Easttown stars Academy Award-winner Kate Winslet as Detective Mare Sheehan, a lifelong resident of Easttown, a hamlet in the Philly suburb known as “Delco” famed for its unique pronunciation of the word “water”.

(It’s pronounced “wooder,” or “wadder” if you’re feeling fancy.)

Mare is known as Miss Lady Hawk thanks to a miraculous shot she made in a high school basketball game, but that’s where her glory days seemed to end.

The Mare we meet today is an exhausted husk of a woman, dogged in her pursuit of justice for her neighbours, who double as her lifelong friends.

There is no delineation between what’s personal and professional for Mare, who answers calls from long-time best friends and takes one disgruntled mother’s call for justice all too personally.

Every day Mare is confronted with both the memories of her greatest accomplishment and the lingering sting of everything she’s got wrong. A year before the show opens, a young woman named Katie Bailey disappeared.

While Mare complains that she’s done the leg work and the drug-addicted victim is likely dead in a river somewhere, that victim’s mother – one of Mare’s old friends and basketball teammates – is still crying out for answers.

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Kate Winslet with co-star Guy Pearce in Mare of Easttown.

In addition to this, Mare has to deal with her own personal disappointments.

Her ex-husband is remarrying while she is left to raise her grandson after her own son’s tragic death. It is only in nabbing creeps and settling petty household disputes that Mare can recapture a glimmer of the person she once was: the hero who saved the town.

By all rights, Mare of Easttown should be embraced in the same way that the UK’s Broadchurch was.

Like that smash international hit, it’s a tender, tortuous look at the way crime infests the soul of a community.

Generational trauma abounds in Easttown and one sin inspires six others.

Like that series, the shocking twists erupt from secrets kept to keep up appearances and the drama is rooted by a spellbinding portrait of an unconventional lady detective.

Mare of Easttown is the rare crime drama that has actually taken the best lessons from the genre and put them into action.

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Mare of Easttown is being praised by critics. Picture: HBO

Like Twin Peaks, it honours the soul of its young murder victim. Like the aforementioned Broadchurch, it mourns the rot that taken over every person in one small town. Even the end of Episode 5 feels like a raw, updated version of one of the most heart-pounding scenes in The Silence of the Lambs.

Mare of Easttown’s magic is that it evokes these classic crime dramas while bringing something new: a raw authenticity that makes you realise that at the centre of every murder mystery are human beings getting hurt.

This article originally appeared on Decider and was reproduced with permission