KATE Winslet won the Emmy best drama actress award in 2011 playing the title role in the miniseries “Mildred Pierce”, a very sexy period piece. Our guess is that she might win it again ten years later for her career best performance playing a title role once more in the current Netflix show, “Mare of Easttown”.

In the seven-part mini-series, she plays Marianne “Mare” Sheehan, a police detective in Easttown, a suburb of Philadelphia. Mare used to be a local hero for being the star of their high school basketball team that became a champion 25 years ago.

But now, she is at the crossroads of her life, which is quite a mess. Her son committed suicide, her marriage ended in divorce and her husband is about to remarry. Her opinionated widowed mom lives with her and it so happens that they don’t agree in most things.

She is also battling for the custody of her dead son’s four-year old son whose drug-addicted mother wants to take him away from her. She also has a daughter who’s a lesbian having problems with her own lovelife and cannot decide whether to go to college or not.

To top it all, it’s her job to search for two girls who have been abducted but she cannot find them anywhere and the towns people are already questioning her competence. As if all these problems are not enough, another local girl then gets murdered.

Her police chief is urging her to undergo grief counselling as she looks so weary, but she is against it. She does a stupid thing when she plants evidence against her ex-daughter in law to prove she should not get custody of her son, but the police chief discovers it and she gets suspended.

The series tries to be a lot of things, first as a whodunit. Who kidnapped the missing girls and who murdered the teenage mom whose body was found in the river? Are these crimes all connected?

Mare might be in the title but Easttown is also in it and the show is actually a textured tapestry of their town and its inhabitants. It has so many characters, most them are suffering because of their own doing, maddeningly making the most foolish decisions and choices and just plain doing a lot of stupid things.

And it works mostly because of the strong ensemble acting of the very big cast who makes it all feel truly quite tragic than just mawkishly sentimental. It’s fairly believable despite the overly contrived twists and turns in its plotting to keep you forever guessing.

The mystery of the missing girls and the murdered one might give the series its main conflict, but in the course of its seven episodes, it becomes clear that the show is more interested in exploring the lives of its people.

The success of the show is mainly due to the sublime performance of Kate Winslet who holds it all together playing the title role who we see being healed at the end after she finally asks the help of a therapist. Still, at seven episodes, you can feel the padding to stretch it and its gloomy undertone.

This could have been more compact at five episodes, like ‘Halston’. It really flags at the 6th and 7th episodes after the kidnapping case was solved, specially when they wrap everything up at the last half hour to give everyone a proper closure. But you have to commend writer Brad Ingelsby and Director Craig Zobel for effectively giving the show a palpable bleak sense of its dreary small town setting.

But he really introduced just so many characters, some as possible suspects to throw us off the scent (like the poor deacon who was wrongly accused). They could have been cut from the story to make the pacing quicker. But we’re happy to see a series that is so female-centric, with so many strong women characters.

Kate Winslet started as a teenager in the acclaimed film “Heavenly Creatures” then went to star in “Titanic” which was the number one movie for sometime and for which she got an Oscar nomination, ultimately winning it for “The Reader”. It’s nice to see her deglamorized but still immersing herself totally playing substantial lead roles like Mare, who’s flawed just like most of us, but manages to redeem herself in the end.

Also outstanding is Jean Smart who steals some scenes as her acerbic mom. That scene after a funeral where Jean is revealed to have committed an indiscretion is really a laugh out loud moment. Another standout is Julianne Nicholson as Lori, Mare’s best friend whose marital life is in shambles due to a philandering husband. She and Kate have a falling out and their reconciliation near the end is truly so touching.

Other actresses who give superb performances are Enid Graham as Dawn, a cancer survivor whose daughter is missing; Chinasa Ogbuagu as Beth, Mare’s friend who has a problematic drug-addicted brother; and Sosie Bacon as Carrie, Mare’s initially combative daughter in law who eventually acknowledges her shortcomings.

Among the guys, the best for us is Evan Peters (also a stand out in “Pose”) who has a good command of his role as the young cop paired as an investigator with Mare who later falls for her. His drunken scene in the bar is such a gem he deserves to get a best supporting nomination at the very least.

Guy Pearce plays a writer and college professor who provides some romantic spark in her life but Mare is not yet ready for another relationship. He and Kate work so well together, which is not surprising as they did even better work in “Mildred Pierce”.