Seeing a positively capable character going about their business gives me a special joy. It helps if they have sharp tongues, short fuses, and don’t suffer fools willingly. Oh, the proxy liberation of watching them get it and end the shit — ringing around fat bosses and sloppy rogues while they do it. They are like knives that cut through life’s complexities.
That’s part of Sergeant’s charm.Catherine Cawood, a no-nonsense middle-aged policewoman of the Yorkshire Police Department and star of the brilliant British police drama happy valley, The third and final seasons are currently airing on AMC Plus, BBC America and Acorn TV. Kaywood isn’t a hard-working detective, he’s just a statue of a hard worker. A street veteran who knows every corner, every face, every sob story in beats in the desolate and picturesque rolling hills of West Yorkshire, North England. Another part of her charm is that she is a stubborn matriarch of her family nearly torn apart by tragedy, trying to keep her family together by sheer force of will, but she always gets along. It’s not going to be. After all, some of her life’s complicated problems just can’t get through.
Cawood is the work of writer Sally Wainwright and her frequent collaborator, actor Sarah Lancashire. happy valley After debuting in 2014 and season 2 airing in 2016, it disappeared for seven years while Wainwright did some queer historical bullshit. gentleman jack and concluded her family play Last Tango in Halifax. (Both of these shows, like most of Wainwright’s work, were set in her hometown of Yorkshire.) The long wait for the third season was excruciating. in England, happy valley Viewing reservation is required. When the series finale aired in the UK earlier this year, it was watched by 11 million people. In a country of 67 million people, this is a big deal.
Sergeant Kaywood did not escape the passage of time. Seven years have passed in the drama, which means Kaywood is nearing retirement, and her grandson Ryan (Rhys Kona) has grown from a rough sea urchin to a fine 16-year-old. Ryan is secretly in touch with his father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), a perverse criminal, and Kaywood blames him for the death of his daughter, Ryan’s mother. i hate it vehemently. In her season one, she arrested Lois for being involved in her dastardly kidnapping-murder plot, but then Lois nearly killed her in her brutal hand-to-hand combat. In Season 2, he manipulates the woman (Shirley Henderson) he has a crush on from behind prison into stalking Ryan. He is still serving a life sentence and still has a dark obsession with both his son and his son’s grandmother.
While this may sound theatrical and soapy on paper, it kind of does – Wainwright learned his vocation on the long-running British soap opera. coronation street The 1990s continues to maintain its flair for punchy sensationalism and cliffhanger plots among its more prestigious productions. But these stories are treated with deep humanism and a bitter, salty, down-to-earth humor, and the characters are warm and real and feel familiar. happy valley Gives off a gritty, almost western flavor, just like a kitchen sink justifiedif the cool cowboy marshal was an exhausted perpetual cross granny who’s fed up with everyone’s shit.
At the start of the season, Kaywood is called in after a dead body was found in a quarry, but the body turns out to be related to Lois, potentially opening up a chance for a reduced sentence. Also, the season’s complex side effects involve a violent gang of prescription drug dealers, a high-handed football coach at Ryan’s school, the coach’s frightened wife with a drug addiction, and the pharmacist who supplies her. The plot is also drawn in.
Wainwright looks with the same atrophy at the prescription drug epidemic as he did in season 2, where he turned Eastern European women’s trafficking into sex slavery. But Wainwright often has something to say, happy valley It never feels like a problem show. It focuses too much on story, characters, and community for that. And while Wainwright could write monsters like Lois, he’s equally (if not more) interested in more mundane kinds of evil. It is weak and selfish family men who, with a mixture of incompetence and meanness, turn to the most terrible deeds. against women. Season 1 featured Steve Pemberton as a hired employee plotting the kidnapping of his boss’s daughter. In Season 2, Kevin Doyle played a woman-playing cop trying to cover up his tracks. In Season 3, Amit Shah plays a pharmacist who feeds young female addicts.
Catherine Cawood is the perfect angel of vengeance to take down these mean and self-deceptive people. She’s acerbic and relentless, but she’s common sense and compassionate. She is one of Lancashire’s great creations, a titan of television acting who has played a sassy bartender on a TV show. coronation street Playing 532 episodes, he has matured through a regal middle age to become one of the most compelling protagonists on the British screen. As Kaywood, she makes the most of that powerful physical presence, her keen gaze, and the deep wells of both her mercy and anger. She has a power that cannot be ignored.
But all that matters is that Kaywood is almost always right. She can be blinded by her anger at times, but her determination turns into blind single-mindedness, especially if it’s directed at her loved ones. In season 3, when she learns that Ryan has been in contact with Lois, she boldly reunites with the people closest to her: her grandson Ryan and her younger sister Claire (Siobhan Finneran), who is recovering from alcoholism. but she sees it as a betrayal. Up to this point, the drama has stuck to a very capable and moral heroine, but Wainwright and Lancashire dared her to show how destructive the forces driving her movement were. Unleash the
The season takes a dramatic turn, but if the subplots don’t tie together as satisfyingly as the previous two seasons, it’s balanced out by the Shakespearean aspect of the storyline that ties Caywood, her family, and Lois together one last time. is preserved. Wainwright is hesitant about the price of Katherine’s hate, even sympathetic to the villain’s misguided need for connection.but just as tough happy valley So the outlook is neither grim nor pessimistic. Some evil just needs to be subdued. And sometimes a stern granny in a high-vis vest is the one who has to do it.
