Mare of Eastown
Brad Ingelsby broke into the film scene after graduating from AFI when one of his movie scripts was forwarded to a producer by a friend in what Vanity Fair describes as "a dramatic twist most screenwriters would find too clichéd [...]." After an initial offer of 50,000 dollars for the script, Relativity eventually bought it for more than half a million dollars. Reading about Ingelsby's career trajectory, I get the sense that his Delco-oriented sensibility and working class-centered writing gave his scripts a specificity that was sincere and unique, leading many already-established Hollywood stars to champion his work (Christian Bale with Out of the Furnace (2013); Ben Affleck and The Way Back (2020)). IndieWire writes that Ingelsby's first venture into TV writing with Mare of Easttown was only greenlit by HBO thanks to Kate Winslet's commitment to playing Mare Sheehan. "With Winslet attached; HBO expressed interest." Ingelsby, having already made a name for himself as a screenwriter, had forwarded his pilot and the script for episode 2 to Winslet directly. In an interview, he says that Kate Winslet is more similar to Mare than people may think, she's "down-to-earth."
Ingelsby says he felt that a TV format suited Mare of Easttown better as the show focused on the complex relationships within the Easttown community and wanted to take its time to flesh out these complexities. He feels that the film format encourages dynamic protagonists with singular goals to pursue, a story which he has to tie up with a nice bow within two hours. Further, not only was he interested in the specific culture of Easttown as a Delco community, he had hoped to emphasize the relationships between working class women and their investment in one another's lives. The TV show format gave him a chance to play showrunner, working in close contact with the actual director, set, and crew (direct involvement on set is something he lacked with films). Kate Winslet was also the executive producer and had a lot of input in how the women were portrayed. Star power seems to be moving everything along, recently; limited series by HBO Max and Hulu featuring stars like Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman are frequently produced by them.
Ingelsby describes the challenges of the TV format. He watched as fans of the show theorized about the killer and had to correspondingly adjust the hints he was leaving along in the episodes. He didn't want viewers to "get there" before the writers did. In that sense, audiences themselves had an indirect input to each episode, reacting and tweeting and theorizing as each episode drew them closer to the truth. Watching the pilot, I was surprised by the slow pace of the episode. I'm a frequent police procedural/crime drama viewer and, in viewing Mare of Easttown, immediately picked up on the emphasis on characters and the relationships between them ("I'm a character writer," Ingelsby told Vanity Fair). Taking the familiar crime drama genre, Ingelsby invites established audiences into a familiar generic format only to perform a bait-and-switch by experimenting with generic hybridity in order to tell a profound story about a Delco community, instead. Specific (localized) and yet tapping into a larger, universal narrative — a narrative of American working class discontent, precarity, and sincerity...
- Chili Shi
