British TV’s most badass cop is a pissed-off grandma
It’s a particular pleasure to watch a character who’s just aggressively skilled go about his business. It helps if they have a sharp tongue, a short fuse, and don’t like to suffer fools. Oh, the vicarious liberation of watching them figure it out and get shit done – running around silly bosses and sleazy miscreants as they do it. They are like a knife that cuts through life’s complications.
That’s part of the appeal of Sgt. Catherine Cawood, a no-nonsense middle-aged policewoman in the Yorkshire Constabulary, and the star of the brilliant British cop drama happy valley, the third and final season of which is currently airing on AMC Plus, BBC America and Acorn TV. Cawood isn’t a seasoned detective, she’s just a hard-working cop: a veteran of the street who knows every inch, every face and every sob story in her beat in the bleak, picturesque hills of West Yorkshire in the north of England. The other part of her appeal is that she’s the hardened matriarch of a family nearly broken by tragedy, who tries to hold it together through sheer force of will, but doesn’t always succeed. In the end, some of life’s complications cannot be broken.
Cawood is the creation of writer Sally Wainwright and her regular collaborator, actor Sarah Lancashire. Happy valley debuted in 2014, had a second season in 2016, then disappeared for seven years as Wainwright developed her strange historical romp Lord Jack and concluded her family drama Last Tango in Halifax. (Like most of Wainwright’s work, these shows were also both set in her native Yorkshire.) The long wait for the third season was excruciating. In the United Kingdom, Happy valley is essential, watch by appointment: When the series finale aired in the UK earlier this year, it was watched by 11 million people – a big deal in a country of 67 million.
Sergeant Cawood has not been spared the passage of time. It’s also seven years later in the show, meaning Cawood is close to retirement, and her grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah) has grown from a scruffy boy to a slim 16-year-old. Ryan has been secretly keeping in touch with his father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), a deranged criminal who passionately hates Cawood and blames him for the death of her daughter, Ryan’s mother. In Season 1, she arrested Royce for his part in a grim kidnapping and murder plot, but not before he nearly killed her in brutal hand-to-hand combat. In Season 2, he manipulated a woman in love (Shirley Henderson) from behind bars to stalk Ryan. He is still serving a life sentence and is still darkly obsessed with both his son and his son’s grandmother.
If this sounds theatrical and soapy on paper, it is – Wainwright learned her craft on the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street in the 1990s, and has retained a knack for racy, sensational, cliff-hanging conspiracies in her more prestigious work. But these stories are treated with deep humanism and mournful, salty, down-to-earth humour, between characters drawn so warmly and realistically that you feel like you know them. Happy valley throws in a gritty, almost western flavor – sort of like a kitchen sink Justifiedif the cool cowboy marshal was a tired, perpetually evil grandma who’s just tired of everyone else’s shit.
As the season progresses, Cawood is called upon for the discovery of a corpse in a quarry which, it turns out, has ties to Royce and could give him a chance to have his sentence reduced. It also reels in the season’s tangled knot of secondary plots, involving a violent gang of prescription drug dealers, a coercive football coach at Ryan’s school, the coach’s harassed wife addicted to the drugs, and the pharmacist who her supplies.
Wainwright takes a scathing look at the prescription drug epidemic, in the same way Season 2 tackled the trafficking of Eastern European women into sex slavery. But though Wainwright often has something to say, Happy valley never really feels like a problem show; it’s too focused on story, character and community for that. And while she can write monsters like Royce, Wainwright is just as interested (if not more so) in a more banal kind of evil: weak, selfish family men who, through a mixture of incompetence and venality, turn themselves into the most heinous of deeds. against women. Season 1 had Steve Pemberton as a duped employee who orchestrates the kidnapping of his boss’s daughter; season 2 had Kevin Doyle as a philandering police detective trying to cover his tracks; season 3 has Amit Shah as the pharmacist who feeds a young woman’s addiction.
Catherine Cawood is the perfect avenging angel to take down this cowardly, self-deceiving all. She is bitter and unforgiving, but also sane and caring. She’s one of Lancashire’s great creations, a titan of TV acting who played a sassy barmaid on Coronation Street for 532 episodes before emerging at stately middle age into one of the most magnetic protagonists on British screens. As Cawood, she makes the most of her powerful physical presence, penetrating gaze, and deep wells of both compassion and anger. She is a force to be reckoned with.
Crucially, however, Cawood is almost always right. She is sometimes blind to her anger, especially when it is directed at those she loves, and her determination turns into blind determination. Season 3 boldly puts her at odds with those closest to her – her grandson Ryan and her recovering alcoholic sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) – when she discovers Ryan’s contact with Royce, which she perceives as a betrayal. Until now, the show has stayed close to its fiercely skilled and moral heroine, but now Wainwright and Lancashire are daring enough to let her loose to show just how destructive the forces driving her crusade can be.
The season goes for the dramatic jugular, and if it doesn’t tie its subplots together as satisfactorily as the previous two seasons, it’s made up for by the Shakespearean dimensions of the storyline that brings Cawood, her family, and Royce together for the last time. Wainwright has reservations about the price of Catherine’s hatred, even pitying her villain’s misguided need to connect. But as tough as Happy valley is, it is neither bleak nor bleeding in its prospects. Some forms of evil just need to be suppressed. And sometimes a tough granny in a safety vest is the one you need to do it.