For anyone who is well and truly over this whole seasonal cheer business and wants to get back to grappling with man’s inhumanity to man, we have some excellent news: relentlessly grim police procedural Happy Valley season 3 hits BBC iPlayer on January 1. Happy New Year.
If you’ve not partaken of the brooding Happy Valley before, it follows the exploits of dogged police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) as she investigates the darkest crimes imaginable in Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, while trying to raise her grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah), whose teen mother committed suicide. Why? Because Rhys is the product of rape, and the boy’s criminal father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) remains a distant but ever-present threat throughout the entire series.
It’s bleak stuff. How bleak? “Joy Division on the trailer” bleak.
This final batch of six episodes marks the end of the ironically titled Happy Valley for now and are the first new episodes since Season Two aired in early 2016. Written and created by veteran Sally Wainwright (Last Tango in Halifax, Gentleman Jack), who also directs some episodes, Happy Valley is superb crime drama steeped in unblinking social realism and makes a good deal out of contrasting the picturesque, pastoral setting with the genuinely upsetting events it depicts.
After last season saw Sergeant Carwood struggle to clear her name after being implicated in a string of murders, and Royce try to reach out to Ryan via a school teacher/crime groupie (Shirley Henderson) who infiltrated his school, this third season sees the implacable plod trace a gangland murder victim back to Royce, while Ryan, now sixteen, wrestles with the notion of establishing a relationship with his father, and Catherine’s recovering alcoholic sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) caught in the middle.
This final outing for Lancashire’s world-weary cop is sure to please the millions of fans who tuned in for her first two seasons, and if nothing else, Happy Valley proves that it’s always grim oop north.
