This BBC detective series is full of cliff hangers and twists: NPR

Sarah Lancashire plays kind-hearted police sergeant Catherine Cawood in Good Valley.

BBC

hide caption

toggle caption

BBC

Sarah Lancashire plays kind-hearted police sergeant Catherine Cawood in Good Valley.

BBC

Not so long ago, a handful of shows were commonly offered as examples of television quality. In America, these touchstones tended to be extremely masculine – The Sopranos, Thread, Mad Men, breaking Bad. The exact opposite was true in Britain, where the defining titles of the 21st century – Flea bag, Kill Eve, I can destroy you – are by and about women.

The most popular of this group is happy valley, the BBC cop series that caused an instant sensation when it premiered in 2014. Created by Sally Wainwright and centered on a female police sergeant in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, it set the benchmark for serials. policewomen anchored by complicated women. You find his DNA all over a show like Easttown Mare.

When happy valleyThe third and final season of aired in Britain earlier this year, it was a hit with critics and viewers. It has now arrived on our screens on BBC America, Acorn TV and AMC+. These last two services also offer the first two seasons, and I highly recommend you see them. With a grand arc unfolding over nearly a decade in real time, the 18 episodes of this series take viewers on a twisting, suspended, and deeply satisfying emotional journey.

In the star turn of a lifetime, Sarah Lancashire plays Sgt. Catherine Cawood, a strong, big-hearted divorcee who often sports a yellow police vest. Catherine is raising her grandson, Ryan, whose mother committed suicide following the trauma of being kidnapped and raped by Ryan’s father, a sociopath named Tommy Lee Royce. Tommy is played by James Norton, who you might know as the crime-solving vicar in Grantchester. While Season 1 focused on Catherine bringing Tommy to justice, Season 2 dealt with her trying to create a normal life for her family while her nemesis plots revenge from prison.

At the start of Season 3, seven years later, Catherine is about to retire and take a trip to the Himalayas. Her world is turned upside down when she discovers that 16-year-old Ryan has started communicating with Tommy – he wants to know more about his father. Even though Catherine wants Ryan to stop, she’s still working hard, investigating a murder Tommy may have committed ten years ago and dealing with a drug-addicted woman who she fears will be abused by her husband.

Now Wainwright – who also created Last Tango in Halifax and the gender-specific HBO series Mr Jack – knows how to attract you. Season 3 features amusing police jokes, pungent family arguments, elaborate prison escapes, casual murders, elaborate murders, dramatic confrontations, and moments of deep personal betrayal. Through it all, his characters burst with humanity — even evil ones, like the often soft-faced Tommy, whom Norton makes an unnerving mercurial villain.

Catherine’s police work allows Wainwright to capture a Yorkshire she knows perfectly well. While Easttown Mare was rightly praised for its portrayal of a small town in Pennsylvania, happy valleyThe detailed insight into its community is even richer, and not just because the local dialect is as thick as Yorkshire pudding. We get Catherine’s world in all its harsh reality – the poverty, corruption, drug use, domestic violence, gangsterism and despair that stand in stark contrast to the region’s tradition of working-class solidarity and its often beautiful landscape.

The show revolves around Lancashire’s full press of a performance in a role that asks him to do it all. Catherine is an honest and rude cop. She’s a foster mother who mourns her dead daughter, raises Ryan with boundless love, and worries that her journalist ex-husband is in trouble while investigating a gang. He’s a woman’s linebacker who more than once has been bloodied from knockdowns with male felons. And she is a vengeful woman who, sensitive to the weakness and violence of men, protects women in particular.

Catherine is no saint, of course. She jumps to conclusions, lashes out at her sister, and in her protectiveness of Ryan, she doesn’t let him know what Tommy really looks like. But its flaws only deepen our sense of its strengths. Indeed, she emerges as one of the true feminist heroines in the history of television. happy valley is not a happy place, but I have always enjoyed being around him.