Set in the industrial Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, Happy Valley is a riveting 18-part, three season drama centring on the personal and professional life of Police Sergeant Catherine Cawood and her immediate family.
Exploring the ties that bind, Cawood (a superb, empathic Sarah Lancashire) is a popular sergeant working out of the small police station in Sowerby Bridge, a few miles west of the larger Halifax. She lives at home with grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah) and sister, recovering addict Clare (Siobhan Finneran). It’s the historical background behind this arrangement that forms the central drama to all three seasons (shot over a nine year period) of Happy Valley. Family is the heart of the series: police investigations, whilst core to the unfolding narratives, are, with one significant exception, almost secondary.
Tragedy struck the Cawoods a decade earlier with the suicide of teenage Becky, Ryan’s mother, just weeks after the boy’s birth. With Catherine overcome with grief, refusing to give up Ryan, the Cawood family fractured – husband Richard (Derek Riddell) moved out, as did their 19 year-old son, Daniel (Karl Davies). Hanging in the air is the fact Ryan is the result of rape: recently released prisoner Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) is the biological father but unaware of the boy. It’s the conflict between Catherine and Royce, whom she blames for Becky’s death, that creates the intensity of the unfolding drama over the three seasons. She fights tooth and nail to ensure there is no contact between him and her grandson: it’s how Catherine deals with its escalation and her uncompromising stance that impacts on the rest of the family.
Interwoven in the family dramas is the everyday procedural work of the local police force. Royce is integral to enquiries and suspicions of the main season one investigation (and which spills over into seasons two and three). Over the course of the 18 epsiodes, Happy Valley features kidnapping, rape, multiple murders, extortion, prostitution, drugs, violence, police corruption as well as the minor daily infringements. Yet this is a very British prolice procedural narrative: this is no gun-toting underbelly of Los Angeles or Chicago. Ne’er a gun is fired and, in most instances, rules are followed. Catherine can be a bit of a larrikin but audience empathy is completely behind everything she does.
Admittedly, the central drama between Catherine and Royce pushes the boundaries of believability and slips into melodrama – but central characters Sarah and the desperate-to-please Clare are so preoccupied with their everyday, it almost doesn’t matter. The three seasons are building to that final confrontation, come what may – and the audience is taken every step of the way.
Rating: 82%
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