Sally Wainwright’s remarkable crime drama Happy Valley must have fallen through a time warp. Finally sitting down to watch its third season, I realized a whopping nine years had passed since the last one; I’d been anxiously awaiting the new episodes ever since, assuming they’d been produced shortly after and only unavailable due to the vagaries of the streaming wars. Turns out, though, season three was produced just a few years ago! Well, time has not dulled the brilliance of Wainwright’s pen or the depth of Sarah Lancashire’s talent, because the show hasn’t even remotely lost a step.
Happy Valley takes place in a rural stretch of northern England, its idyllic façade concealing an exploitative underworld driven by drug trafficking and organized crime. About to transition into a hard-earned retirement, Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Lancashire) has attempted to move on from the traumas of her past: the rape and subsequent suicide of her daughter Becky, the upbringing of her grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah), and multiple violent confrontations with Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), the sociopath responsible for it all. While Royce has been brought to justice, his toxic influence lingers from prison. The discovery of a dead body at a local reservoir sets in motion one last clash between Catherine and Royce — driven in many ways by an insidious relationship Royce has secretly managed to make with Ryan. Meanwhile, there is one last domestic case Catherine gets wind of, involving Ryan’s abusive gym teacher Rob Hepworth (Mark Stanley), his long-suffering wife Joanna (Mollie Winnard), and local pharmacist Faisal Bhatti (Amit Shah), who got in over his head illegally supplying prescription pills to Joanna and others in the community. Before she can hang up her uniform one last time, Catherine will be forced to negotiate this complex web of conflicting criminal agendas, and find her own emotional closure in the wake of a lifetime of tragic loss and heroic perseverance.
Be advised, from start to finish Happy Valley traffics in subject matter worthy of multiple content warnings — rape, sexual assault, and violence against women, often graphically depicted. But unlike so many procedurals, it handles the material respectfully, with both proper gravity for the suffering and critique of the misogyny, greed, and corruption that causes it. By focusing on the consequences of crime rather than the mechanics, Happy Valley scratches the cop-show itch without succumbing to its more toxic subtexts, resulting in a powerful drama about resilience. Sarah Lancashire is all-time awardworthy in this, carrying her tortured character through several emotional transformations as she winds down her career and finds closure in her many fraught relationships — with Royce, and Ryan, and her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) — giving her story a deeply satisfying resolution. It’s not always an easy watch, but Happy Valley is outstanding, its final season every bit as good as I remember its previous ones, if not more so.
