‘Long Bright River’ Composers Turned Gritty Philly Into A Character Set To A Classical Music Score – Sound & Screen TV

Long Bright River composers Dimitri Smith and James Poyser ultimately met to collaborate on Peacock’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s novel because they are represented by the same agency, Fortress.

“We had a great phone call, and it has become a great marriage,” Poyser said on a panel for the series at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Television. “You know, all the arguments to the marriage.”

“It’s been misery ever since,” his collaborater Smith joked in response.

The pair shouted out showrunner Nikki Toscano for her collaboration on the project as well as Moore, who served as an executive producer on the series.

“It was a really, really positive, good working environment where we felt like we could be our best creative selves, and we had a really clear guiding light from Nikki,” Smith added. “She knew what she wanted. Liz Moore as well. We just really knew where we were going for the whole time. And she gave us the room to find out what that would actually sound like.”

That started, according to Poyser, with representing Kensington, PA, where the story is set, as a character in the show. The eight-episode series follows Amanda Seyfried’s Michaela “Mickey” Fitzpatrick, a police officer whose district becomes hit particularly hard by the opioid crisis. Mickey’s intuition and instinct lead her to investigate that more than just drugs are killing young women on the streets.

“Also there’s an element where the character of Mickey, she had the aspirations of being a classical musician,” Poyser added. “So there was this marriage of the grit of Philly and then with the classical.”

A factor and wild card of sorts in the story that viewers don’t learn until the end of the first episode is that Mickey’s sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) is on the streets too.

“It really had to balance that marriage between the really personal story between two sisters, ultimately, who are finding their way back towards each other after a whole lot of trauma and loss, and then the story of police drama on top of that, and then there’s a murder mystery,” Smith said of crafting the show’s score. “So like you said, balancing all those things was finding that classical element that we both love to lean into. We had some really great string musicians and then just balancing it with a lot of the grit that the story needs. Me and James keep joking about the word grit — we’re going to use a few times.”

Local boy Poyser, who hails from Philadelphia, went around the city collecting noises to store in his arsenal for the show’s score, and he even made a drum kit out of found materials.

Check back Monday for the panel video.