The Excruciating Ending of Amanda Seyfried's 'Long Bright River' on Peacock Explained

It’s hard to put into words just how much I disliked Peacock’s Long Bright River. I haven’t read the novel it’s based on (though I have read another Liz Moore book), but I’ve read enough detective novels to recognize the type. If the book is anything like the show, it’s the worst kind: not bad enough to quit 100 pages in, but never good enough to feel worth the effort. It just drags the reader along with periodic revelations, bookending what is otherwise an endless slog.

The Amanda Seyfried-led series is the kind of show that has you begging for it to get to the point. I spent at least half of its eight-hour runtime making the “wrap it up” motion, as if twirling my finger could speed things along. The pacing is agonizingly slow. Worse, the killer’s identity is glaringly obvious by the third episode, and the only thing keeping me engaged was the hope that it wouldn’t be so painfully predictable.

And I like Seyfried—she’s fantastic in The Dropout—but she’s completely wasted here. Her role demands so little of her beyond looking serious and occasionally shedding a tear. The whole experience is like watching a turtle crawl across a gravel road when all you want to do is pick it up and carry it to the other side.

For those who’d rather save themselves the misery, here’s the storyline—spoilers and all.

Seyfried plays Mickey, a beat cop recently assigned a new partner, Eddie Lafferty (Dash Mihok). The two stumble upon a dead woman, an apparent overdose victim. Meanwhile, Mickey’s sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), a struggling addict, has gone missing. Mickey refuses to let the case go, eventually realizing the overdose victim was actually murdered. As more women turn up dead under similar circumstances, she discovers that each had been injected with a lethal dose of insulin.

Mickey ropes in her old partner, Truman (Nicholas Pinnock)—a gambling addict—to help her investigate since her boss keeps stonewalling her. She also drops Lafferty after two episodes because he lacks compassion for the victims.

Before long, Mickey figures out the killer is a cop. This revelation coincides with another: Simon (Matthew Del Negro), a deadbeat who groomed Mickey when she was in high school, is the father of her son, Thomas. He wants nothing to do with the kid. He’s also a cop.

And then comes a big twist: while Simon is Thomas’s father, Mickey isn’t his biological mother. Her sister, Kacey, gave birth to him, but Mickey took custody because Kacey was too deep in her addiction to parent. This, of course, raises suspicions—could Simon be the one killing Kacey’s old friends?

Nope. Red herring.

Kacey’s disappearance? Another red herring. She turns up alive, cleaned up, and living with her father—whom she and Mickey had been told was dead. Their grandfather, Gee (John Doman), another cop, had lied about it. So now he’s a suspect, too.

But guess what? None of these revelations really matter to the murder investigation. It wasn’t Simon. It wasn’t Gee. It wasn’t even Truman, Mickey’s ex-partner-turned-love-interest. No, the killer was Lafferty—the partner Mickey ditched early on. It was obvious the moment he conveniently disappeared from the series. They tried to bury him beneath layers of red herrings, hoping we’d forget about him. But come on—you don’t cast Dash Mihok as a cop who vanishes after two episodes unless you’re setting something up.

Anyway, after falsely accusing Truman of being the serial killer, Mickey—now reunited with her sister—figures out the truth. She confronts Lafferty in an abandoned building, holds a gun to his head, and extracts a confession. But she doesn’t kill him. Instead, a group of addicts—friends of the murdered women—emerge from the shadows and shoot him dead. Mickey covers for them.

She’s cleared in the ensuing IA investigation but quits the force to pursue her first love: music. As for Truman? He can’t forgive her for suspecting him, so no happy ending there. But at least Mickey, Kacey, Thomas, and Kacey’s newborn end up together, forming some semblance of a family.

And that’s it. Seven hours and 55 minutes longer than it took you to read this.