The final time we noticed Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, she was attempting—and fairly magnificently failing—to seize one in every of her police-force colleagues, the nebbishy John Wadsworth, who’d lastly been implicated within the homicide of his lover. The pursuit is a bleak comedy of errors: Directed by her superiors to not pursue John down practice tracks, Catherine mutters “bollocks” and follows him anyway. The pair find yourself on a bridge in relentless rain. Catherine, who says that she’s by no means educated in negotiation, asks John—who’s efficiently talked down 17 folks from numerous ledges—what to say to compel him to not leap. She has to maintain him speaking, John says. “You’ve got to be assertive. Reassuring. Empathetic and kind. And you’ve got to listen.” Catherine tells John to take his time, that she’ll be there. His face discernibly modifications. “I love my kids,” he tells her; he propels himself backward.
The scene is wrenching, all the way down to the strangled noise Catherine makes when John jumps, the way in which she crumples to the bottom. It additionally doesn’t make sense. On Happy Valley (whose third and closing season arrived final week on AMC+ and BBC America), a grim, comedian crime drama set in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, Catherine does nothing however negotiate. In the present’s first scene, she banters fluently with a heartbroken drunk man who’s threatening to set himself on fireplace; in later episodes, she pleads with a mom to name her if her fugitive son comes dwelling, and convinces a household whose daughter has been kidnapped that getting the police concerned is their solely viable choice. Throughout the collection, language is her energy and her sharpest weapon. She speaks, or she refuses to. (No one on tv workout routines the silent therapy with extra terrifying hostility.) We’re left with the ghost of a suspicion, then, that her failure to avoid wasting John won’t even have been a failure in any respect.
Ever since she made her TV debut in 2014, Catherine—performed by Sarah Lancashire and written via all three seasons by Sally Wainwright—has been the rarest of unicorns anchoring a collection: an odd, middle-aged lady written with such care and breadth that she turns into extraordinary. Over the previous few a long time, the phrase robust feminine character has come to face for numerous sticky archetypes in widespread tradition: the corseted, ponytailed warrior; the sensible skilled with a catastrophic private life; the practice wreck turning her trauma into artwork. Viewers wished characters imbued with narrative and psychological complexity; we acquired uncovered abs, Claire Danes’s cry face, rote and exhausting arguments over “likability.” But, with Happy Valley, we additionally acquired Catherine: fearless, moody, perceptive, abrasive, indispensable. The present makes no apologies for her. The extra she errs, the extra fascinating she is to look at.
If Happy Valley had been only a character research, it could nonetheless be enthralling. (In Britain, when the collection aired its closing episode earlier this yr, a whopping 7.5 million folks watched dwell, and plenty of extra streamed it later.) But the collection has a much bigger theme in thoughts—one which the seven-year hole because it final aired has solely helped draw out. Men within the present are usually frail, usually damagingly so; in all three seasons, a small man, feeling humiliated, makes a horrible determination that precipitates disaster. The recurring metaphor is obvious: Men set fires, and ladies put them out. The present is fascinated with concepts of weak point and power (“Man up, princess,” Catherine tells her companion as they strategy one particularly nasty crime scene), with how resentment can corrode an individual’s humanity however how surviving can too. Some folks endure, Happy Valley insists, not as a result of they’re superhuman however just because there aren’t any different choices.
In Season 1, Catherine introduces herself to the lighter-wielding drunk man matter-of-factly: “I’m Catherine, by the way. I’m 47. I’m divorced. I live with my sister, who’s a recovering heroin addict. I’ve got two grown children—one dead, one who don’t speak to me—and a grandson.” Catherine’s daughter, Becky, is buried in the identical graveyard as Sylvia Plath, with all of the inferences that affiliation provides—like Plath, Becky died by suicide. She had been abused and assaulted by a drug seller named Tommy Lee Royce (performed by James Norton), who will get out of jail within the present’s first episode, and whose freedom presses on Catherine till she will be able to hardly breathe. What Tommy doesn’t but know is that Catherine is elevating his son, Ryan (Rhys Connah), and what we quickly study is that her determination to take Ryan on price her her marriage and her relationship together with her solely surviving baby.
Ryan, a candy, severe boy in Seasons 1 and a pair of and a surly however loving teenager within the closing season, is the battleground for the present’s philosophical and bodily scrimmages. A cloud hangs over Catherine’s life with him—the query of whether or not he may have inherited Tommy’s cruelty, his pathological narcissism, the enjoyment he takes in hurting folks. But Tommy is uniquely damaged on the present (and Norton performs him with spectacularly wealthy malevolence); most different characters who harm folks accomplish that rather more ordinarily. In the top, nobody on Happy Valley is an island. You can observe in nearly each scene how folks’s actions ripple out into the broader neighborhood, whether or not an inflow of low-cost medication offered from ice-cream vans or the informal disdain with which Catherine bullies a subordinate.
One of the issues that makes Season 3 so wealthy, in truth, is that Catherine is discernibly tougher as a personality. Facing her final day after 30 years on the power, she tells her sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), “Most police officers die within five years of retirement, maybe because they can’t let go—I don’t know. Me, I’m counting the seconds.” She’s pleased with her service, and but it appears to have eaten away at her—seeing the brutality and the wasted lives, going through the Sisyphean burden of attempting to salvage a neighborhood that medication move via like water. “Every day we have to deal with kids off their heads on whatever rubbish they can find to inject themselves with, and it never stops,” she says within the first season. “It just never stops.” By Season 3, the medication have modified—prescription drugs are edging out heroin, reflecting actuality within the nation’s north—however the penalties are the identical. All Catherine can ever do is clear up the mess.
Watching Mare of Easttown in 2021, I didn’t fairly piece collectively on the time how a lot the HBO miniseries emulated Happy Valley from prime to toe: the grieving mom elevating her grandchild, the police officer who makes grievous errors and but is—in lieu of any higher various—the linchpin of her neighborhood. Men are weak on Mare, too; they harm folks after which collapse when it’s time to face what they’ve wrought. The present’s central character, performed by Kate Winslet, was critiqued for specific abuses of her energy that, as one reviewer wrote, “aren’t as easy to forgive as the show seems to think they are.” But the purpose, I feel, was that they shouldn’t be forgiven. It issues that we’ve feminine characters on tv who will be totally, painfully terrible, even whereas they’re additionally the very purpose we’re watching. Catherine is grandiose and bitter. In rage, she deliberately says issues to folks she loves that she is aware of will tear them extensive open. But doing so doesn’t make her “bad,” no matter meaning. She’s a personality who doesn’t must exist on both facet of a good-bad binary, as a result of folks—messy, type, traumatized folks—typically don’t both. She’s flawed, and she or he’s riveting. One final outing together with her is a present.