It’s a special treat to watch a character who is downright aggressive and competent as she goes about her work. It helps if they have a sharp tongue and a short fuse and don’t like to put up with fools. Oh, the vicarious liberation of watching them figure out “Find It Out” and “Get Shit Done” – fooling goofy bosses and sloppy villains along the way. You are like a knife that cuts through life’s complications.
That’s part of the appeal of Sgt Catherine Cawood, a no-nonsense, middle-aged policewoman with the Yorkshire Constabulary and the star of brilliant British police drama happy valley, The third and final season is currently airing on AMC Plus, BBC America and Acorn TV. Cawood isn’t a hot detective, she’s just a hardworking police officer: a veteran of the road who knows every inch, every face and every sob story as she roams the grim, scenic hills of West Yorkshire in northern England. The other part of her appeal is that she’s the hard-nosed matriarch of a family nearly broken by tragedy, and she tries to hold it together with sheer willpower, but doesn’t always succeed. In the end, some complications of life cannot be broken.
Cawood is the creation of writer Sally Wainwright and her frequent collaborator, actress Sarah Lancashire. happy valley debuted in 2014, had a second season in 2016, and then disappeared for seven years while Wainwright developed her queer historical adventure Gentleman Jack and completed her family drama Last Tango in Halifax. (Like almost all of Wainwright’s work, these shows were both set in her native Yorkshire.) The long wait for season three was agonizing. In the United Kingdom, happy valley is essential, booking: When the series finale aired in the UK earlier this year, 11 million people watched it – a big deal in a country of 67 million.
Sergeant. Cawood has not been spared the passage of time. It’s also seven years later in the series, meaning Cawood is nearing retirement and her grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah) has gone from a scrappy brat to a lanky 16-year-old. Ryan secretly keeps in touch with his father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), a perverted criminal whom Cawood hates passionately and who blames him for the death of their daughter, Ryan’s mother. In Season 1, she arrested Royce for his involvement in a sordid kidnapping and murder plot, but not before he nearly killed her in a brutal hand-to-hand combat. In Season 2, he manipulated a woman in love (Shirley Henderson) behind bars into pursuing Ryan. He is still serving a life sentence and is still obsessed with his son and his grandmother.
If that sounds theatrical and soapy on paper, it is — Wainwright learned her craft on the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street in the 1990s and has retained a talent for hard-hitting, sensational and cliffhanging plots in her more prestigious works. But these stories are treated with deep humanism and rueful, salty, down-to-earth humor, with characters drawn so warmly and realistically that you feel you know them. happy valley gives it a sombre, almost Western flavor – like some sort of kitchen sink Justifiedif the cool cowboy marshal was a tired, permanently upset grandma who’s just sick of all that shit.
At the start of the season, Cawood is called to the discovery of a body in a quarry that turns out to have ties to Royce and could potentially give him a shot at a reduced sentence. It also delves into the season’s convoluted subplots involving a violent gang of prescription drug dealers, a pushy soccer coach at Ryan’s school, the coach’s intimidated wife who is a drug addict, and the pharmacist who supplies her.
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Wainwright takes a scathing look at the prescription drug epidemic, just as Season 2 tackles the trafficking of Eastern European women into sex slavery. But though Wainwright often has something to say, happy valley never really feels like a themed show; It’s too focused on story, character, and community for that. And while she can write monsters like Royce, Wainwright is just as interested (if not more so) in a more mundane kind of evil: weak, self-serving fathers of families who, through a mixture of incompetence and bribery, turn into the most horrific acts against women. Season 1 starred Steve Pemberton as an employee who orchestrates the kidnapping of his boss’s daughter. Season 2 starred Kevin Doyle as an unfaithful cop trying to cover his tracks. In Season 3, Amit Shah plays the pharmacist who treats a young woman’s addiction.
Catherine Cawood is the perfect avenging angel to take down these cowardly, self-deceitful everymen. She is bitter and relentless, but also reasonable and caring. She is one of the magnificent creations of Lancashire, a television actress giant who played a cheeky barmaid in the TV series ‘2019’ Coronation Street 532 episodes long before becoming one of the most alluring leading actors on British screens in the stately Middle Ages. As Cawood, she makes the most of her powerful physical presence, piercing gaze, and deep wells of compassion and anger. She is a force to be reckoned with.
Crucially, though, Cawood is only almost always right. Sometimes she is intimidated by her anger, especially when directed at those she loves, and her determination turns to blind purpose. Season 3 brings her boldly at odds with those closest to her – her grandson Ryan and her recovering alcoholic sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) – when she discovers Ryan’s association with Royce, which she sees as a betrayal. Up to this point the series has remained close to its supremely capable and moral heroine, but now Wainwright and Lancashire dare to let her loose enough to show just how destructive the forces fueling their crusade can be.
The season is about the dramatic jugular, and if it doesn’t pull its subplots together quite as satisfactorily as the previous two seasons, that’s offset by the Shakespearean dimensions of the storyline, which brings Cawood, her family, and Royce together one last time. Wainwright worries about the cost of Catherine’s hatred and even feels sorry for her villain’s misplaced need to bond with her. But as hard as happy valley That said, the prospects are neither bleak nor heartbreaking. Some forms of evil simply need to be crushed. And sometimes you need a tough granny in a safety vest for that.
