![]() (The final episode will be available on June 26th.) This latest iteration comes nearly seven years after Season 2, and the significant break in between has allowed Wainwright to develop more fully her two animating ideas: that victims of violence have to contend with its consequences long after the wrongdoers have been convicted, and that our culture has a maddening predilection for prioritizing the atonement of men over the pain of women. This past May, “Happy Valley,” a two-time BAFTA winner for best drama, returned for its third and final season on AMC+, BBC America, and the British-programming streaming service Acorn TV. The show also boasts a tour-de-force central performance by Lancashire, who recently charmed American audiences with her turn as Julia Child in the Max series “Julia.” And yet, despite the weighty subject matter, any trace of self-seriousness is dispelled by the production’s sardonic wit and chatty, neighborly warmth. Though the show’s tensest set pieces can rival the heart-in-the-throat action of any antiheroic police drama, the creator, Sally Wainwright (“Gentleman Jack,” “Last Tango in Halifax”), displays a fascination not with violence but with the lengthy shadow it leaves behind. (Catherine’s decision to take in the infant herself also led to her divorce from her husband, played by Derek Riddell.) Notably, most of these events took place offscreen, before the start of the series. He’s been informed that his father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), is in prison, but Catherine is loath to burden him with the knowledge that Tommy raped her daughter, Becky, who ended her own life shortly after giving birth to Ryan. Season 2 concludes with Catherine staring despondently at her ten-year-old grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah), dreading the day that she’ll have to tell him about his origins. The unusually intimate crime drama is premised on the observation that it is women-especially older women-who have to clean up and live with the messes that men so thoughtlessly make. This scene occurs in the second season of “Happy Valley,” which premièred in the U.S. Catherine’s recitation of a police caution, the U.K.’s version of the Miranda warning, is as gentle and as absolving as a prayer. As the sergeant pieces together what happened, she wraps her arms around the dazed mother and cradles her head. The previous night, Alison’s son had admitted that he was wanted by the police for the killing of several local prostitutes in the morning, to spare him from prison, Alison shot him before attempting suicide through an overdose of pills and alcohol. After entering a blood-soaked farmhouse, she elicits-softly but persistently-a murder confession from Alison (Susan Lynch), the fortysomething mother of a maladjusted adult son. ![]() ![]() On a misty, windswept day in Brontë country, Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), the protagonist of “Happy Valley,” makes the kind of arrest that sets her apart from other TV cops.
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