'Hightown' Premiere Review: Murder, drugs and rehabilitation form the crux of Starz’s crime thriller
A woman (Sherry) and her friend (Krista) are out in the middle of nowhere trying to score two fingers from a peddler. The woman in question is confident that she is safe during this exchange, so when her friend urgently needs to pee, she tells her to go ahead and do it out in the open. Considering it is nowhere, the two do not have to worry about someone seeing them. The peddler arrives and asks if the woman is Sherry and when she confirms, she suffers two gunshot wounds to the face and the men take her body along with her and drive her car away without realizing that they have left a witness behind. This is the opening scene of Starz's new show 'Hightown' in Episode 1.
Then we meet Jackie Quinones (Monica Raymund) a National Marine Fisheries Service Agent who is out patrolling with her partner. She is looking forward to the carnival weekend at P-Town aka Provincetown in Massachusets. She is lesbian and loves a good party, which also includes abusing drugs, and alcohol. She has a good time the first day around, ends it with a one-night stand. It is the next morning that she sees a body washed up on the shore while she steps out from this woman's flat to pee. It is a girl and this shocks her, but she calls it in.
Detective Ray Abruzzo (James Badge Dale) and his partner from State Police, narcotics team catch the case and it blows up into an investigation against Frankie who is in jail. Turns out Sherry, the dead girl was the CI for Ray. So Ray suspects that someone who knows Frankie and wants to impress him has done this. So, the first thing that Ray does is reach out to the guy in jail, but he learns nothing new. Instead, he gets a rap from his boss for going off by himself without speaking to anyone on the higher up.
But from, the looks of, Ray has barked up the right tree after all. In the meanwhile, Jackie is off the charts high on cocaine and she meets another girl who loves to party just like her. The two of them try some grade A drug and the two of them end up tripping on everything that is happening at the carnival. At the end of their night, the two end up in a car with Jackie driving at high speed and the two get distracted with sex. The second that Jackie takes her eye off of the road, she put herself and the other woman in danger and just as we thought, the two meet with an accident.
All that Jackie remembers though is only getting into the car. She wakes up the next morning in a jail cell with an injured arm, realizes that she did call her partner in her daze and the news that she gets is that the girl is injured and at the hospital. While she might get well and get better, Jackie could possibly be charged with a felony instead of a misdemeanor. The only way she can convince the judge that this is a misdemeanor is by signing up at a rehab and it is this rehab that connects the murder, the witness, and the person who found the body.
The new episodes of 'Hightown' drops every Sunday on Starz.