Long Bright River

At times, the reveals in ‘Long Bright River” are a bit heavy-handed. .... Overall, though, this is a tense and at times brutally raw mystery thriller that keeps us guessing until the enormously satisfying finale. Seyfried is nothing short of phenomenal as Mickey.

The deeper Mickey digs into the corruption of her city, the better we understand her own sorrows and regrets in a suspenseful tearjerker. [24 Mar - 13 Apr 2025, p.4]

As intriguing as the mystery surrounding the murdered women is, Seyfried’s performance as Mickey elevates this series.

A remarkably gripping thriller and an exquisitely tender family drama, the series does its breathlessly daunting goals justice even though it lacks certain key viewpoints.

While this streaming version could have been told in less than eight hour-length episodes, showrunner Nikki Toscano’s compelling take gets everything else right.

There are some awkward bends in this “Long Bright River,” but with its strong sense of place, sequences of ride-along policing and twisted sisters storyline, it’s a must for lovers of female-driven dysfunctional family crime dramas.

Peacock’s Long Bright River, based on Liz Moore’s bestselling 2020 novel, tests the limits of both Seyfried’s dramatic capacity and the crime limited series as a format, and mostly succeeds—though it takes a while to get where it’s supposed to go.

Long Bright River isn't a bad show. In fact, it's a very, very solid show with some excellent performances.

Between Seyfried’s performance and the bread crumbs we get about Mickey’s past in the first episode, there’s enough to keep us watching Long Bright River. But we can’t shake the feeling that, without Seyfried in the mix, the show would be indistinguishable from other procedurals of its type.

Long Bright River, whose eight-episode season will stream in full on March 13, is neither a transcendent nor an incompetent example of this type of show. But in its familiarity, it illustrates the limitations of the popular fantasy that one extraordinary woman can right the entrenched wrongs of a broken patriarchal institution.

It has a winning performance from Amanda Seyfried. .... But the structure of the series, and the underlying mystery driving it, isn’t as compelling. (It’s not difficult to figure out the killer; the whole thing could have been done in half the time.)

“Long Bright River,” created by Nikki Toscano (“The Offer”) and Liz Moore and based on Moore’s novel, neglects credible crime solving in favor of gothic melodrama that jumps between clichés of family reconciliation and feminist empowerment. The emotional logic changes from scene to scene, while Mickey mostly reads as bottled up, evasive and uninteresting; the one-note character makes minimal use of Seyfried’s abilities. (Pinnock, Harriet Sansom Harris, as Mickey’s landlord, and Perry Mattfeld, as one of the prostitutes, do good work.)

That Seyfried and Cummings are able to take audiences to any sort of satisfying destination is admirable and even rewarding. But not even they can make you forget how much better this too-long, insufficiently bright journey could have been.

By its closing scenes, when characters just sit down to have a nice long cry about their feelings, it’s hard to find many reasons why “Long Bright River” couldn’t have made the journey to that catharsis a little more exciting.