
Content warning: There are many, many spoilers for the first five episodes of Mare of Easttown in this article. Please read on at your own risk.
No, seriously. So many spoilers.
On Monday, the fifth episode of Mare of Easttown dropped on Binge.
The Kate Winslet-helmed series follows a very specific group of white people living in a small, cold town in Pennsylvania, where the lols are many and the women keep on disappearing.
The first season, which is dropping an episode per week, has quickly become one of the most talked about TV shows of 2021.
Watch the trailer for Mare of Easttown. Post continues below.
It somehow manages to straddle that precarious territory between goofy comedy and doomy drama, allowing us to laugh out loud in one scene, before tackling the hefty topics of drug addiction, suicide, murder and molestation in the next.
The writers have created a world we want to visit every week, so we can catch up with the locals at the dive bar, see how Betty Carroll is going with the whole peeping tom "ferret" saga, and also solve that string of pesky murders and disappearances.
The people of Easttown have quickly become like family, albeit a family in which at least one member is a killer/pedophile.
But there's one character we fell in love with harder and faster than the others. And that's Mare's county police partner Detective Colin Zabel, played by Evan Peters in the series.
Zabel arrived in town in episode two to a frosty reception from Mare, but he quickly won both Mare and us over.
And that's exactly what series creator Brad Ingelsby, director Craig Zobel and Peters wanted to happen.
Speaking to the Vanity Fair podcast Still Watching: Mare of Easttown, Zobel and Peters explained they wanted to create a character that was so endearing, it would destroy the audience when he is killed off.
“I felt like it was very clever,” Zobel said of Ingelsby’s script. “He’s having his cathartic moment where he’s becoming more active as a character, after we’ve heard his backstory and how he didn’t really solve that case in Upper Darby. It’s just taking a person directly at a point in which they have the most opportunity, and stopping them.”
We'd not only bought into Zabel's backstory and the man he was becoming, but we were also super invested in his potential romance with Mare.
By episode four, we had totally bought into the fantasy of a 40-something grandmother hooking up with her police partner who doesn't look a day over 25 and whose mother seems very... involved.
We could imagine them catching serial killers by day and sharing a greasy pizza with Helen and the rest of the gang at Mare's house at night.
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