Hightown review – Jerry Bruckheimer crime drama is slick but sombre

A lot of things about new drama Hightown (StarzPlay) begin to make sense when you learn that it was executive-produced by quintessential 80s spirit Jerry Bruckheimer – a man whom I imagine still sports blouson leather jackets and possibly legwarmers in tribute to his golden years. I would say the show has an old-fashioned feel about it, if that didn’t conjure images of Victorian fustiness and kettles boiling over open grates. It has the sheen and slickness of his movies, and slips down as easily as the TV creations he modulated into thereafter. (All the CSIs are his; it began 20 years ago. If you reel at this, do seek out a recent thread of disorientation on Twitter that was kicked off by a teacher’s minor meltdown at a student essay that referred to an event in the 90s as occurring in “the late 1900s”.)

Set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Starz follows the investigation into the murder of Sherry Henry (Masha King), a young opioid addict, after her body washes up in the bay. It is found by a National Marine Fisheries Service agent, Jackie Quinones (Monica Raymund), a hard-partying self-described “gold-star lesbian” as she makes her way home after a night of hard-partying and gold-star lesbianing.

The murder was witnessed by Sherry’s best friend, a former addict called Krista (Crystal Lake Evans), whose attempts to find a safe place to stay among the family and friends she has alienated forms a quiet but sorrowful background to the opening episodes’ action.

Interagency drug cops Ray Abruzzo (James Badge Dale) and Alan Saintille (Dohn Norwood) have hold of the official investigation. Sherry, it turns out, was Ray’s informant. Passing news of the drugs kingpin Frankie Cuevas (Amaury Nolasco, best known for playing sweet Sucre in Prison Break, but here a menacing character), currently in prison awaiting a drugs kingpin kind of trial, is what got her killed. Ray, as is virtually traditional, visits Frankie’s stripper wife, Renee (Riley Voelkel), in her club and threatens to blow the stripper whistle on her and have her kid taken into care. As is absolutely traditional, after this rocky start their relationship looks set to flourish in both a heart- and genital-based way very soon.

(Sidebar: for the portion of you consumed as I was for the first half hour with trying to work out who it is that Abruzzo/Dale reminds you of – it’s Lyle Lovett. Face shortened and pulled into alignment – that’s it. You’re welcome.)

All of which is by way of saying: Hightown works off a solid, formulaic base. It also relies on coincidences such as Quinones’s friend Junior (an occasional breacher of lobster-fishing regulations and also – did Jackie but know it – a Cuevas aide with Sherry’s broken false nails all over his boat) becoming her sponsor in a town full of more viable options. It also keeps the official and unofficial investigations apart for too long and stretches out the time it takes for various pennies to drop sometimes past a point that is wholly credible.

Where the creator, Rebecca Cutter, departs from standard mode and adds both value and USP is in the overlying story of Quinones’s journey to sobriety as, haunted by the discovery of Sherry’s corpse, she pursues her own inquiry into her killing. Within the confines of what remains fundamentally a crime thriller/procedural, the agonies and ecstasies of the breaking down and the building back up of an addict are not skimped. The tentacular reach of the US opioid crisis informs the whole. The sense of place that is conjured is remarkable, and how Provincetown’s industries (fishing, drug-trafficking, tourism) and surface attractions work on and power each other is attentively and cleverly done. And a series that sets itself deliberately in a place primarily known as a summer mecca for wealthy, white gay men and gently sets that aside to concentrate on the local people trying to make a living there all year round deserves some recognition for chutzpah alone.

And the show has such a gift in Raymund as Quinones, who layers her part so expertly and convincingly that – without wanting to denigrate the rest, which is solidly entertaining – her scenes seem almost to come from a different endeavour entirely. Hightown itself probably won’t win any awards – although it does undoubtedly deserve the particular praise reserved for all things that are better than they need to be – but she should.