What ‘Mare of Eastown‘ and Kate Winslet was to Delco back in 2021, Thursday’s debut of the ‘Long Bright River‘ series on Peacock with Amanda Seyfried is to Kensington — an often grim, grey yet hopefully dramatic portrayal of Philadelphia neighborhood police officers investigating crime in their surrounding circles.
In the Nikki Toscano co-created ‘Long Bright River‘—Toscano herself hailing from nearby Newark, Delaware—Amanda Seyfried’s character, Officer Mickey Fitzpatrick, patrols a grimly familiar beat: Kensington’s opioid-ravaged streets. When a string of murders shakes the blighted neighborhood, Mickey’s investigation takes on an even more personal edge—her long-missing younger sister, an addict, may be connected to the case.
South Philadelphia-based author Liz Moore, the woman behind the 2020 novel of the same name, is part of the Peacock process as one of the series’ co-creators, executive producers, and episode screenwriters.
“I was immediately moved by what I saw and heard,” Moore told The Book Network about her first visits to Kensington, and how they jolted her to keep a diary, and commit to community work at women’s day shelter spaces like the St. Francis Inn. “All of those inspirations combined to create the inspiration for ‘Long Bright River.’”
Fans of Liz Moore’s hard-boiled, heartfelt novel ‘Long Bright River’ might recall that former President Barack Obama was so impressed by the book that he featured it on his annual reading list. It seems his admiration for Moore’s haunting and provocative storytelling hasn’t waned—he did the same for her action-packed 2024 novel, ‘The God of the Woods’, a gripping tale of a young girl’s disappearance from a summer camp and the working-class community intertwined in the mystery.
“I could say that the first seed of the novel, ‘Long Bright River’, was planted in 2009, when I first set foot in Kensington – a tight-knit, vibrant neighborhood in Philadelphia that has become very dear to me, and that is often misunderstood and misrepresented in the national media,” wrote Moore in a Peacock network profile. “I could say that the first seed was planted by my own family’s history of addiction, which has spanned many generations and has been a topic of conversation among us since well before I was born. I could say that being a sister inspired ‘Long Bright River’, or living in the city of Philadelphia. Really, it’s a mix of all of these.”
On Moore’s own author website, she goes on to discuss having spent time in Kensington across the last decade, before and after having written ‘Long Bright River’, and how that time has allowed her “the privilege of learning about, and sometimes directly working with, local organizations that serve communities touched by some of the themes included in the novel, such as addiction, homelessness, domestic violence, and underserved public schools.”
Along with that note, Moore provides readers with the opportunity to donate their own time, money and energy to local causes such as Mighty Writers and the St. Francis Inn — a volunteer space on the 2400 block of Kensington Avenue that serves those in need with meals, clothing and assistance on a daily basis — portrayed on screen throughout the Peacock series.
