Tommy Lee Royce is a nasty piece of business with boundless charisma. If Lancashire is the heart and soul and brain of Happy Valley, Norton is some murkier organ, no less essential to the functioning of the body, but too drenched in viscera for the spotlight. She’s as good as any actor you’ll watch this year or any year. Every contradiction in the character is built into Lancashire’s performance the flaws and heroism go hand-in-hand. It’s no wonder that as Catherine’s retirement is approaching, nobody in her precinct knows if they’re supposed to throw her a party because it’s never completely clear if she’s the most loved or hated officer on the force. She makes smart decisions for the wrong reasons and stupid decisions for the right reasons. She’s brilliant, but emotionally damaged to the point of myopia, but still wonderfully droll and sarcastic, but still caring and maternal. Whatever your pantheon of conflicted TV cops happens to be - some combination of Sipowitz/Tennison/Mackey/McNulty/Pembelton would be a good starting point - Catherine Cawood is in that tier. Off to the side, but inevitably moving toward the forefront, is Ryan’s hostile soccer coach (Mark Stanley), abusive husband to Mollie Winnard’s Joanna and neighbor to Faisal (Amit Shah), a pharmacist being squeezed by the region’s drug syndicate. This seems like a strange moment for Ryan to begin to take a real interest in his dad, but he’s 16 and trying to understand himself, so what are you going to do? Then a body is dredged up from the bottom of the local reservoir and the evidence points in the direction of Tommy Lee Royce (Norton), Ryan’s biological father who’s incarcerated for life for two seasons of murder, rape and overall sociopathy. With her grandson (Rhys Connah’s Ryan) well into his teens and no longer as dependent on the grandma who raised him after his mother’s suicide, Catherine has begun to think of a future without the murder, organized crime and general tumult of the beautifully photographed hills and valleys of West Yorkshire. The story picks up with Lancashire’s Catherine Cawood nearing retirement from the police force. The new season is a step below the first two in its narrative momentum, but Lancashire and Norton are so good and the resolution between their characters is so satisfying that nothing else really matters. Sally Wainwright‘s locomotive of a series reminds you of the things you’ve forgotten when they’re relevant, and otherwise charges forward with trademark intensity, driven by an all-timer of a performance from Sarah Lancashire and her near-equal foil James Norton. Several months after its British premiere, the third and final season of Happy Valley is finally set to make its domestic debut between BBC America, AMC+ and Acorn TV (with the first two seasons streaming on the latter two platforms) and I’ll just admit it: I remembered almost none of the secondary details and characters from two previous seasons I loved.
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