Kate Winslet has many talents, but playing a salt-of-the-earth police detective in a working-class Pennsylvania town doesn’t seem to be one of them. Winslet’s miscasting is the biggest and most obvious mistake of the HBO miniseries Mare of Easttown, but it’s far from the only issue. Even with a more fitting star, Mare of Easttown would still be a generic, slow-moving crime drama, the kind of series that mistakes lengthy episodes and a proliferation of somber subplots for depth and meaning.

As has become standard for modern crime dramas, Mare of Easttown focuses on a single case over the course of its seven-episode season, although it takes until the final shot of the first episode for creator Brad Ingelsby (who wrote every episode) to reveal what mystery Detective Sergeant Mare Sheehan (Winslet) will be investigating. That first episode meanders through the personal dramas of various supporting characters, building up a sufficient number of suspects for the eventual murder of local teenager and single mother Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny).

RELATED: Avatar 2: Kate Winslet Felt Safer Filming Underwater Than On Dry Land

More suspects for Erin’s murder pile up in subsequent episodes, which are full of red herrings and narrative dead ends. That’s common for a murder mystery, and in a well-crafted series, it would be satisfying to see the pieces fall into place, rather than annoying every time another hyped-up lead amounts to nothing. As a screenwriter, Ingelsby has experience with crime dramas (Out of the Furnace, Run All Night) as well as personal stories about small-town life (The Way Back, Our Friend), but he doesn’t handle either particularly well here, despite an abundance of both crime and personal drama.

Mare herself has a lot on her shoulders, in addition to investigating Erin’s death. She’s still working on the year-old case of a missing young woman, and town residents, including the missing woman’s cancer-stricken mother, are upset at the lack of results. Mare is also still reeling from the suicide of her own son, which was one of the main catalysts for her divorce from her ex-husband Frank (David Denman). She’s the guardian of her young grandson, whose recovering-addict mother (Sosie Bacon) is filing for custody. And she lives with her cantankerous mother Helen (Jean Smart) and her mostly responsible teenage daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice).

Angourie Rice in Mare of Easttown

Every one of these people gets their own subplots of varying duration, as do a dozen or so other characters in Easttown. It’s the kind of small town where everybody knows everybody, via family relationships or professional associations or just time spent at the neighborhood bar. “Anybody you’re not related to?” asks out-of-town Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), who’s brought in to help with the investigation. “No,” Mare answers immediately.

The dynamic between Mare and Zabel is one of Mare of Easttown’s most clichéd cop-show elements, as the younger straight-arrow detective joins the investigation at the order of department supervisors, and the old-school grizzled veteran resents his presence. Mare and Zabel eventually come to a positive working relationship, but the time wasted on their initial antagonism is indicative of how much energy Ingelsby puts into rote plot elements that either go nowhere or end up with the most predictable possible outcome. In a later episode, when Mare’s boss demands that she turn in her badge and gun, there’s no question that she’ll be back on the case (without permission) within a few scenes.

RELATED: Everything Coming to HBO Max April 2021

The investigation follows a path familiar from dozens of other season-long crime dramas, from The Killing to Broadchurch to HBO’s own Sharp Objects. Episodes often end with cliffhangers about a possible suspect, and at least once in the first four episodes, the shocking revelation is walked back almost immediately at the beginning of the next episode.

Ingelsby spends as much time on character development as he does on procedural details, and he seems to be aiming for a layered portrait of a small town full of secrets. But the characters are mostly one-dimensional blue-collar stereotypes, and there are so many of them that the show becomes unwieldy, even with episodes that run nearly a full hour each.

Kate Winslet and Evan Peters in Mare of Easttown

Winslet can never quite give Mare the bone-deep world-weary presence she needs to be believable as the seen-it-all detective or the harried mother, and the supporting cast is uneven, although it includes plenty of talented actors. Julianne Nicholson, who mostly just looks concerned and supported as Mare’s best friend Lori, would probably have made for a more effective lead.

Guy Pearce (reuniting with Winslet after their work together on the 2011 HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce) is appealing as Mare’s unlikely college-professor love interest, but Peters still looks a bit awkward playing a responsible grown-up. Smart is sassy but doesn’t get much to do, which is especially disappointing given her excellent crime-drama work on the second season of Fargo.

More than halfway through the series, there’s barely any momentum to the mystery, and the relationship drama is sprawling and unfocused. Viewers might expect an HBO crime series to have some added thematic resonance beyond the simply solving of a crime, but Ingelsby and director Craig Zobel don’t bring any insights on class differences or culture clashes or any other potential issues below the surface of the case. It’s just a basic mystery that could have been wrapped up in an episode or two of a network procedural, with a more convincing detective on the case.

Starring Kate Winslet, Julianne Nicholson, Angourie Rice, Jean Smart, Evan Peters, Guy Pearce, David Denman, Joe Tippett, Cailee Spaeny, John Douglas Thompson, Patrick Murney, James McArdle, Sosie Bacon and Neal Huff, Mare of Easttown premieres April 18 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.

KEEP READING: WandaVision's Evan Peters Is Playing Jeffrey Dahmer in New Netflix Series