Happy Valley Review

Sally Wainwright writes every episode herself, and the series never once sounds like a writers room smoothing a character down. Catherine Cawood is a uniformed sergeant in her late forties, not a detective and not a maverick, and the first thing she tells a stranger is the worst thing that ever happened to her. Sarah Lancashire plays her without a single bid for sympathy, which is exactly why the sympathy arrives.

The first run puts a botched kidnapping alongside Catherine's private certainty that Tommy Lee Royce, the man who raped her daughter, is out, and Wainwright lets the two plots collide by accident rather than by design. James Norton is genuinely frightening in a part that could have been a stock psychopath, and Siobhan Finneran's Clare, a recovering addict sharing the house, gives the show its one room where people say what they mean.

The Calder Valley does a lot of the work: wet stone, narrow roads, a community where everybody knows whose son did what. The weaknesses are of scale. Series two leans on a serial killer subplot harder than the material needs, and the eight year wait for the third handed it an occasion it then had to live up to. It did, mostly, ending at a kitchen table rather than in a chase. Best drama series at the BAFTAs more than once, and it earned every one of them.