'Long Bright River' and 'Dope Thief' Are Hoagies and Cheesesteaks in TV Form

Two new Philadelphia-set crime dramas, reviewed

It’s been a big Q1 for the city of Philadelphia. First the Eagles won the Super Bowl, and now there are two crime drama limited series set in the city premiering this week. One is Peacock’s Long Bright River, a gloomy mystery starring Amanda Seyfried as a cop looking for her missing sister on the opioid-plagued streets of Kensington. The other is Apple TV+’s action-packed thriller Dope Thief, which stars Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura as guys who rob drug dealers, Omar Little-style, and get in big trouble when they rip off the wrong people. I watched both of these jawns. Dope Thief is more my kind of thing and is objectively better, but Long Bright River has stuff going for it, too.

Long Bright River — which is out in full on Peacock now — is based on a novel by Liz Moore, who created the show for TV with Nikki Toscano. Amanda Seyfried plays Mickey Fitzpatrick, a beat cop who patrols the gritty neighborhood where she grew up. Her younger sister Casey is a homeless addict. A killer is preying on sex workers in the neighborhood, and Casey is missing. So Mickey is trying to find her and the killer before it’s too late, while she deals with her own problems.

Mickey is an interesting twist on the traditional troubled cop character. Her flaw is that she thinks she’s better than the people around her, which is a different flaw than usual. Usually it’s that they can’t open up emotionally or they’re too angry or something like that. Mickey had a tough childhood, but she was smart and driven enough to get into Penn, which would have given her a path out of the neighborhood. But she didn’t graduate and went back to Kensington and became a cop, in part so she can keep an eye on her sister. She feels a lot of guilt for how Casey turned out, but she also judges her for not being able to get her life together the way she did. And that’s the interest-piquing irony of Mickey’s character, because Mickey does not have her life together. She thinks that because she’s more cultured than her Eagles-loving, Yuengling-drinking family she’s not like them, but she’s a product of her environment just as much as they are. She had a better shot of making it out of Kensington than any of them, but she didn’t. She has trouble being honest with herself about who she really is. But she really does care about her sister and the other women like her on the streets of Kensington, and tries to be a good cop who protects them. She’s a compelling character.

Brooklyn’s Finest. Peacock

Seyfried is great, as always. She has tremendous range. The last limited series she was in was The Dropout, and she won an Emmy because of how thoroughly she committed to nerdily dancing to Lil Wayne. She became Elizabeth Holmes, and she becomes Mickey Fitzpatrick (but the fact that her name is Mickey Fitzpatrick should indicate how much the show loves its cliches).

But even though there are good things about it, Long Bright River is too flawed to rise to the next level. It bears the symptoms of a show that could have been great with a little more time and money. It’s trying to be like Mare of Easttown or Sharp Objects, but it comes up short, because HBO didn’t develop it and cast it. The dialogue is a little too unpolished and expository, themes are underlined with too heavy a hand, and the authenticity isn’t quite there. It was shot in Brooklyn, not Philadelphia, and though there are some similarities between the cities, we’ve all seen both cities on film enough to know that they really look quite different. Brooklyn is much denser, and the houses don’t have porches. Brooklyn gritty isn’t as gritty as Philly gritty. Gritty is from Philadelphia, you know? It’s like how Ireland and Scotland are similar, but Scotland has more money because it’s part of the U.K. (I don’t have to spell out which city is Mickey Fitzpatrick’s in this analogy, you get it.) It would have been difficult and probably unethical to actually shoot in Kensington because of how depressed the area is, but I wonder why they didn’t film elsewhere in Philadelphia.

But in spite of its problems, I was engaged by Long Bright River. At no point did I stop wanting to see what happened next. And even though there’s not much levity, the pace of the thriller plot keeps it from wallowing in misery.

One thing about Brian Tyree Henry is that he can rock a bulletproof vest. Apple TV+

Dad Thief

Dope Thief, which drops its first two episodes on Apple TV+ on March 14, stars one of my favorite actors, Brian Tyree Henry, who is best known for his performance as Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles on Atlanta, one of the greatest performances in TV history. Anyone who watched Atlanta knows that BTH can be hilarious and heartbreaking in the same moment, and that’s the ability that got him cast in Dope Thief. It’s his first lead role, and he was more than due for it. It’s really cool to see him get to play an action antihero.

Dope Thief is based on a novel by Dennis Tafoya and created by Peter Craig, a blockbuster screenwriting specialist (The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick) making his TV debut. Not making his TV debut but lending the project even more heft is Ridley Scott, who directs the pilot. Henry’s Ray and Moura’s Manny have been friends since juvie, and they’re partners in a ripping-off-drug-dealers business together. They pose as DEA agents and go into houses and steal unsophisticated dealers’ shit, and then sell it to local kingpin Son Pham (Dustin Nguyen) for redistribution. It’s lucrative but dangerous work, and after one too many close calls, Manny convinces Ray to cut in a third participant for extra muscle. Unfortunately, the new guy is a Jimmy from Yellowstone lookalike, which means he’s a screw-up. He takes them outside their home turf to a meth lab in Bucks County. They’re expecting a semipro hillbilly cookhouse, but unfortunately for them, it’s actually part of a major operation run by some very serious people, and there are undercover (actual) DEA agents there, too. So now Ray and Manny have to try to evade outlaw biker types, the DEA, and whoever else is after them, while also dealing with problems in their personal lives.

Ray is trying to get sober, his incarcerated father Ving Rhames (who is terrific, of course) is sick and trying to get compassionate release from prison, he’s haunted by the years-earlier death of the woman he loved, and he’s taking care of his stepmother’s dog. Henry is an incredibly vulnerable actor who has talked about drawing heavily on his own pain in his performances, and has one of the most expressive faces in the business. Ray is an exposed nerve, a man who’s done a lot of bad things — and is still doing them — but wants to be healed. He’s also very funny, in the way The Wire, Dope Thief’s biggest influence, was funny.

Dope Thief gets authenticity points for actually shooting in Philadelphia, and does a better job of showcasing the city’s diversity than Long Bright River, which is curiously devoid of Kensington’s large Latino population. Dope Thief also has more life around the margins. Long Bright River doesn’t have anything like Ray taking care of an elderly Chihuahua mix that won’t go to the bathroom when and where it’s supposed to.

Wagner Moura is great as Manny, a man with a genuinely gentle soul who is not built for this life, but I miss Michael Mando. Mando, who was so brilliant as Nacho on Better Call Saul, was originally cast as Manny, but was fired after what was reported as an “on-set physical altercation with another actor.” Peter Craig pushed back on this in an interview with Vanity Fair, saying that Mando just wasn’t right for the part. This explanation is strange to me, because Mando seems perfect for it. He already played a sad criminal really, really well. But Craig said Mando wanted to play it more as a traditional action hero, which isn’t what the role calls for. Too bad either way, because I’d love to see Mando get a big part. It’s been three years since Saul ended, and he hasn’t had anything come out (though he is set for a recurring role in Amazon’s Criminal, a show I’m very excited about). I wonder what the whole story is with him.

In conclusion, Dope Thief is a four-star show, Long Bright River is a three-star show, and I have an idea for a Pennsylvania-themed restaurant called Commonwealth that serves all of the state’s unique foods, shoutout to Hazleton-style pizza from Senape’s, aka pitza, aka cold pizza.