In Mare of Easttown, a seven-episode HBO Max series, Kate Winslet plays a cop for the first time in her career. Every actor in America has to play a cop eventually; it’s in the guild rules. And there are so many cop-centered movies and TV series, the odds of getting a cop role are excellent.

Admittedly, Winslet does a good job because she’s a fine actor, even mastering the tricky local Pennsylvania accent. As Mare Sheehan, she’s packed on some pounds and had her hair dyed a brassy reddish blonde so it could grow out and show several inches of dark brown roots. She wears mom jeans and shapeless sweaters and baggy utilitarian coats to ward off the raw autumn cold, because she’s playing a harried, burned-out cop in a grim, blue-collar Northeastern town where everyone knows everyone, generally to their sorrow.

The show was shot on location near Easttown, Pennsylvania, creating a fictionalized version of the place that emphasizes the dark atmosphere of economic as well as personal depression seeping into everything. Other than Winslet, whose good looks had to be dulled down considerably, everyone in the cast looks like actual working people in such towns — tired, anxious, and podgy from the effects of rotten diets and alcohol consumption. They’re an unglamorous bunch, to say the least. They generally know it, and they make self-deprecating cracks to any newcomer who shows up in town.