I Watch TV: Hightown

 

Hightown Season 1

Jackie Quiñones is a fishery agent in Provincetown Massachusetts. Provincetown is a party town, especially for the queer community. Jackie hooks up with other women, takes drugs, gets drunk. One night, walking down by the shore she finds the body of a woman. She reports this and two state troopers on the drugs task force, Saintelle and Abruzzo, get the case.

Why the drug task force? The woman, Sherry Henry, used to be an informant of Abruzzo and involved with Frankie Cuevas, the local drug lord. He’s in jail, awaiting trial, and someone has taken over and they want to know who.

Jackie spirals out of control, wrecking her car while drunk and high, and with a woman she picked up as a passenger. She’s charged with DUI and to help her case goes into rehab. But she can’t let the case go and discovers that another woman who was in rehab here knew Sherry Henry, and tries to track her down.

Abruzzo meanwhile pressures Cuevas’s girlfriend and father of his son, currently making ends meet as an exotic dancer. But after he gets the information he wants he continues the relationship, falling for her. She wavers between Abruzzo, and Cuevas, meanwhile being pressured in turn by Osito, the mysterious and violent figure who is running things for Cuevas.

Jackie tries to investigate and stay clean, enlisting her friend and local fisherman Junior McCarthy, a former addict trying to get back with his girlfriend and child. Unfortunately though he’s given up on the drugs, he’s still having to work for Cuevas and Osito. As he helps Jackie he slowly realises that he has to divert her as he was the one who took Sherry Henry’s body out to sea, making a mess of the disposal so she drifted back to shore.

It's a crime story about addiction and desire, about obsession and betrayal and secrets. Jackie, gay, can be open about her romantic relationships (which are inevitably short or disasterous, or both), and comes to realise that she’s always in them, and her other relationships, for what she wants and needs and not for the other person. Abruzzo on the other hand starts there, using people to get what he wants, and when he starts to consider other people he has to hide it.

Watch This: Sexy murder mystery about broken people trying to make something worthwhile and mostly failing
Don’t Watch This: Grim look at the inability to get past flaws, mistakes and wrongs