I really got into True Detective last season on HBO. New one coming soon.

Okay, I've been hovering around that, now I will use the viddies to viddy (I’m a Clockwork Orange fan, and btw, Anthony Burgess wrote some other goodie-good little novels)

HAPPY VALLEY

Sally Wainwright is the writer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Wainwright

SO, I think this gem should be taught in film/lit school as a classic plot for this day and age.

To me it is SO Shakespeare. Two kings (of business & wealth): Nevison Gallagher is the good king, but he is gruff and tough and demanding, and the other king, Ashley Cowgill, is the king of property development & a drug dealer; a sinister fellow if there ever was one. Catherine Cawood (MC), a police sergeant (and former detective) is placed between these kings when Cowgill/Royce/Wippley kidnaps Nevison’s daughter. The bad guy and henchman of Cowgill's is Tommy Lee Royce, and he is definitely a really bad guy! The dupe is Kevin Weatherill, accountant for Nevison Gallagher, who is of a weasely and weak constitution, and caught between the two kings in a stroke of character writing genius by Wainwright.

However, and as in a Shakespeare play, it is fiction, always needing a story arc, so I accepted the coincidences of plot and character associations, waiting to see if these coincidences & associations would help or hinder the plot

Tommy Lee Royce, as the antagonist, raped Cawood's rebellious daughter, who then commits suicide, leaving her grandson in Officer Cawood's care. However, the father of the boy is Tommy Lee Royce... So the plot spins tighter and tighter and thicker, and Cawood is drawn into the kidnap of Nevison's daughter... A kidnap involving Royce as a paid minion of Cowgill. Who then rapes Nevison's kidnapped daughter, as he did to Cawood's daughter 8 years previous and for which she sent him to prison for.

And there are some really juicy minor characters: Lewis Whippey, a weak, but humane bad guy; Julie: Ashley's wife... She is a classic, the wife of a bad king caught up in his crimes and machinations, and what a queen she is when mad! Nevison's wife is the good Queen, whose daughter is kidnapped, and who with her terminal cancer, drives the stake of tragedy deeper into the heart of the audience/viewer.

Kevin Weatherill, the weasel of both Neivson & Cowgill, is a character that at first evokes sympathy for his blunders, until  he morphs into a character of sociopathic dimensions in his myopic view of himself and the world. His actions instigate the drama/conflict, the murder of Kirsten McAskill (a police officer), thereby elevating the plot and bringing his disabled wife to a fateful decision to help this well-written weasel. This is heartbreaking as Weatherhill's wife is so good at heart, crippled with MS and you soon realize her blunders doom her (written with excellent dramatic irony) and you can't help but thinking she will crash and burn (with her two children) in tragedy.

The orchestration of the kings, their wives, the minions, on both sides of the protagonist/antagonist battlefield is slowly investigated, developed and held together (fiction wise) by Cawood's obsession into her arch-enemy: Tommy Lee Royce.

The ending, featuring Tommy Lee Royce against Cawood, is filmed on a canal, using a riverboat, and to me evokes the old England that I want to visit (lol). But for all of Cawood's justified hate and revenge towards Royce (a man who desperately wants to be a king), she comes to a moral decision to spare his life, instead of igniting him using gasoline and a cigarette lighter to create a great coflagration consuming her, her grandson and Royce, and thereby regaining so much of the humanity she'd lost in her quest for revenge for impregnating her daughter, seemingly causing her suicide, the shame involving the death of her novice subordinate, and generally making life for Cawood a total misery for almost a decade. (wow, what a sentence, mybad!)

I wrote this long review so I could better understand why I enjoyed this drama so much. In doing so, I now see how Sally Wainwright balanced the MC, the minions, the good and the greed of a small town's, its place in the world of international drug dealing and its insular community nature through the powerful character motivations of Cawood.

Happy Valley.

This crime writer knew HER Shakespeare. Hands down, this is the best plotting I've ever watched in an episodic TV series. Tight, tight, tight and the bad guy is a Robert Redford type in looks, but an animal by nature.

The British do it again!