The title sequence of Hightown lays out the themes of the Starz crime drama pretty clearly: The Textones’ upbeat "Vacation" plays over footage of tourists and families frolicking on the beaches of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, alternating with images of drug use and arrests. The point is obvious: There’s a dark underbelly to this popular vacation spot, with an underground illicit drug trade propping up all the sun-soaked fun. The main characters of Hightown are all Cape Cod locals who deal with the everyday realities of crime and drugs, while partiers breeze in from out of town for a few days.
The series kicks off with the murder of Sherry Henry, a fentanyl addict who’s been serving as an informant for hotheaded state police detective Ray Abruzzo (James Badge Dale). Sherry’s murder touches various parts of the extended Cape Cod community, starting with National Marine Fisheries Services agent Jackie Quinones (Monica Raymund), who discovers Sherry’s body washed up on the beach in Provincetown, where she lives. Although Jackie carries a badge and a gun and insists that she’s part of the law-enforcement community, she’s dismissed as a "fish cop" and isn’t part of the official investigation.
So while Ray and his partner work on finding out who killed Sherry and how that connects to the drug empire run by imprisoned kingpin Frankie Cuevas (Amaury Nolasco), Jackie starts investigating on her own. Both Jackie and Ray are familiar cop-drama figures, the dedicated investigators with messy personal lives whose self-destructive tendencies get in the way of their ability to do good police work. Jackie is a lot more interesting and a lot more sympathetic, though, even as she spends much of the first episode getting blackout drunk, snorting cocaine and driving recklessly -- activities that land her first in jail and then in rehab after she crashes her car.
For Jackie, the Sherry Henry case becomes the focus of her redemption, the one thing that she can control in a life that’s slowly spinning out of control. Raymund is fantastic in the role, adding new layers to a well-worn kind of character, and creator Rebecca Cutter (a longtime Gotham writer-producer) makes Jackie a mix of cop archetypes and progressive queer representation. A self-described "gold star" lesbian, Jackie is the kind of boozing, womanizing cop character almost exclusively portrayed by men in movies and on TV for decades, but she’s not just a carbon copy of a male protagonist with the gender switched.
As Jackie puts it, "In Provincetown, you’re either a fisherman or gay on vacation," and she’s constantly balanced between those two worlds, equally comfortable with the working-class white dudes who are her NMFS colleagues (of course, she’s the only woman and the only person of color employed there) and the flamboyant LGBTQ partiers who flock to the gay mecca of Provincetown, where they can cut loose without fear of judgment or persecution. Her struggles with addiction (to drugs and alcohol, to sex) feel real, and Cutter and her creative team don’t take any shortcuts. Jackie’s journey to sobriety isn’t an easy one, and it mirrors the struggles of so many of her fellow Cape Cod lifers.
Ray is a much less engaging character, much closer to that typical swaggering male cop archetype, and it doesn’t help that he quickly falls into a sexually intimate relationship with Frankie’s stripper wife Renee (Riley Voelkel) while trying to press her for information. Ray is volatile and mean, frequently held back only by his more even-tempered partner. And while Dale’s performance is strong, it’s tougher to root for Ray to succeed in his efforts to find Sherry’s killer when his motivations are so toxic.
The plotting is mostly generic crime-drama stuff, and it drags a bit over the course of the eight-episode season, which could have used a few more subplots to augment the rudimentary investigation (there’s no mystery for the audience about who killed Sherry, so the procedural aspects are all the creators have to build the narrative). But the show builds an authentic sense of place in Provincetown and the other towns on the Cape (the title is a nickname for nearby Hyannis, where Ray’s state police office is located), and a sense of the complex, messy lives of the main characters.
Sometimes those lives are more contrived than complex, and it’s tough to buy into the coincidences that place Jackie’s friend Junior McCarthy (Shane Harper) at the center of her recovery (as her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor), her job (as a commercial fisherman in his family business) and her investigation (as a small-time drug dealer connected with Frankie’s operation). It takes far too long for supposedly smart characters to connect some of the basic plot elements together, and for Jackie and Ray to finally team up on the investigation. The plot is just intriguing enough to keep the momentum going from episode to episode, but given that Hightown gets so many small details right, it’s a little disappointing that the bigger picture isn’t as distinctive.
Starring Monica Raymund, James Badge Dale, Shane Harper, Riley Voelkel, Amaury Nolasco, Atkins Estimond and Dohn Norwood, Hightown premieres May 17 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Starz.