How the ‘Long Bright River’ writers and cast brought Kensington’s opioid crisis to the screen

When she set out to adapt her best-selling novel Long Bright River for television screens, Philly author Liz Moore was committed to portraying the opioid crisis in Kensington — the backdrop for the novel and its adaptation, now streaming on Peacock — with accuracy and empathy.

Both tend to be challenging to capture in many fictional takes on addiction, Moore said in an interview last month before the show’s premiere.

Kensington, and its highly visible opioid crisis, has been the subject of countless news stories, documentaries, and fictional portrayals, from an entire season of Intervention filmed there to Instagram accounts and livestreams that some say exploit people in addiction for clout and advertising money.

In this historically working-class community, residents are protective of how their neighborhood is portrayed — and wary of decades of media productions that define it solely by the crisis on its streets.

“One of the things we talked about was involving the community at every level,” Moore said, explaining that she and showrunner Nikki Toscano discussed at length “the ethics of making art about Philadelphia, and specifically art that would include Kensington.”

The show follows Michaela “Mickey” Fitzpatrick, a police officer working in Kensington whose sister, Kacey, struggles with addiction. As a serial killer targets sex workers on Kensington Avenue, Mickey, played by Amanda Seyfried, works to find the killer and her sister.

“One main reason to tell a story like this is to give a new perspective and to breed compassion. We’re hoping to help be a voice for a community that’s incredibly resilient,” Seyfried said.

The cast and crew worked with Kensington community leaders, harm-reduction workers, and other outreach organizations in the area to get the details and the setting right — everything from how to dress a wound caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine to how to characterize a group of dealers (it’s dope set, not drug corner).

Sarah Laurel, who heads the harm-reduction organization Savage Sisters, worked closely with Ashleigh Cummings, who plays Kacey and visited Kensington Avenue several times to prepare for the role.

“We would talk about my substance use in Kensington, about survivor sex workers and the things we did — what it’s like to be a person going through that crisis, compounded with violence against women and police indifference,” Laurel said. “It was difficult to talk about, but I was very impressed with the way Ashleigh took her time with it.”

Cummings has family members who have also struggled with addiction, but was raised in Australia and had never heard of the crisis in Kensington before auditioning.

“When it came time to film, I tried to spend as much time down the Ave as possible,” she said. “There are a lot of exploitative eyes on Kensington, but our responsibility was to engender empathy, to bring people inside the experience.”

In the show’s opening scenes, Mickey walks down Kensington Avenue with her new partner, who, picking through tents on the sidewalk, asks, “How could someone choose to live like this?” A few scenes later, in a flashback, Mickey’s former partner, played by Nicholas Pinnock, answers the question: “When these women started using,” he says, “they might have had a choice. It’s not a choice for them anymore.”

Pinnock, who is from London, said the cast didn’t want to make “voyeuristic television.”

“We didn’t want people to be shocked into it. We want them to have empathy from the inside. In the media, [the opioid crisis] is portrayed in such a way where there’s a blanket view of these things. Why make another TV show that does that?”

Moore said it was important for the show to portray addiction as a medical condition, not a moral failing — even if some of the show’s characters think otherwise. She also wanted to subvert narratives about “victims” and “saviors” common in crime fiction.

“Mickey perceives herself to be morally upright, almost in contrast to her sister at the start, and over the course of the series, I think she comes to have a much more nuanced understanding of her own complicity in some dark forces in the neighborhood and also within her own family,” Moore said. “She comes to see herself not as the sister who’s done everything right all along, but somebody who’s made some questionable choices herself.”

It was important, too, to portray Kensington as a place with nuance, said Moore, who has volunteered for years in the neighborhood.

“We were really committed to portraying it very holistically — as a place that is underserved, but also a place that is resilient, a place that is hopeful, a place with a really fascinating history,” she said.

Laurel, who consulted for the show, typically avoids media about the opioid crisis — and no fictional portrayal, she said, can truly convey the reality on the street in Kensington.

“I think Kensington has gotten a ton of media, a lot of negative media — it’s been trauma porn,” she said. “My hope is that [Long Bright River] portraying it in a compassionate way opens hearts and minds.”