Mare of Easttown: like Big Little Lies and Undoing, the HBO series used a murder mystery to tell stories about women.
Mare of Easttown’s finale was a great hour of television, but it still left many of us wondering—did we just watch a detective show about a murder investigation, or a show about female relationships and the unwinding of loss, or a show about both? And if so, why has this framing device—using a murder mystery as a vehicle to explore stories about women and mothers—become so ubiquitous? Is it just the cold hard math that complex, layered stories about women need a murder to sell the plot, a sort of “come for the crime and stay for the drama” approach? Or is that the conventions of t...
Source: slate.com