‘Happy Valley’ Is A Masterpiece, One Of The Truest Detective Shows Ever Made

Recently, I finished the first season of Happy Valley, a British police drama that only came onto my radar recently because its third season finally came out in 2023, many years after the second aired all the way back in 2015.

In a way, I’m glad I came to it late. I was going to write about it after binging the first gripping, heart-pounding season but then I just ended up knocking back all three. It’s one of those shows you can’t stop watching, and I had a few later-than-advisable nights burning through episode after episode, needing to know how it would all shake out.

The story takes place in Halifax, an industrial town of about 88,000 in West Yorkshire, UK, just south of the much larger city, Leeds. It’s not the nicest town you’ll find in Great Britain, filled with tenement buildings, junkies, factories and crumbling buildings. But it has its charms, and the countryside around it is filled with rolling green hills.

At the center of the story is police sergeant Catherine Cawood, a middle-aged, tough-as-nails woman with a tragic backstory and an itch for revenge. She’s played by Sarah Lancashire who, I must say, gives one of the best performances of any actor I’ve seen on any television show in my entire life. I cannot properly express the sheer brilliance of Lancashire’s work on this show. Her range is extraordinary. Very few performances have captivated me like hers; she brought Cawood to life in a way that’s so raw and real and profound.

Cawood is a woman who is at once ruled by grief and driven by her devotion to her profession. She’s a good cop and a leader, and just anti-authoritarian enough to piss off her superiors (and just good enough at her job to make them look the other way). She reminds me, in some ways, of Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan in the tremendously amazing Mare Of Easttown. World-weary, no-nonsense, fierce. But she’s not a detective. She’s a uniform with a knack for solving crimes.

Very light spoilers follow.

Cawood’s grief comes from the loss of her daughter some years earlier. She has raised her daughter’s son, Ryan (Rhys Connah). Ryan’s father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) turns out to be a very, very despicable human being. Royce is sort of like a more terrifying Ramsay Bolton (from Game Of Thrones) because he’s scary in a way that feels real and intimate rather than Ramsay’s almost cartoon villainy. James Norton is frighteningly good at portraying this psychopath, because somehow he can—at times—make you actually feel bad for him. Actually, he reminds me a little bit of the villain William Hamleigh from Pillars Of The Earth as well, with all his menace and grievance and narcissism, but with far more charisma.

Happy Valley’s three seasons follow an overarching plot that centers around Cawood and her family, including her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) and her husband and son, as well as the various police officers and detectives she works with and other Halifaxians. But each season has its own sub-plots and cases that Cawood finds herself mixed up with as well, and I noticed as I watched that the format is very similar to Fargo.

I wrote recently about how Fargo’s tried and true template when critiquing season 5. In both the film and its first few seasons on TV, Fargo always had three archetypal characters: The Citizen, The Criminal and the Hero.

The Citizen is a character who is a basically normal person with some kind of chip on their shoulder or some kind of problem that needs solving, and they turn to The Criminal—or commit some crime themselves—in order to solve it. This leads them down The Path Of No Return, where they slowly spiral toward more and more bad choices and horrible consequences for them and their loved ones. Think of William H. Macy’s character Jerry Lundegaard as The Citizen.

The Criminal can take different shapes or even two shapes. One might be a more run-of-the-mill criminal like Steve Buscemi’s character Carl in Fargo; the other is a more diabolical figure who works even further outside the boundaries of normal human behavior, like Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud.

And finally, there is The Hero—often a police officer—who restores order and brings both The Citizen and The Criminal to justice. Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson would fit the bill in Fargo; Catherine Cawood is the Hero of Happy Valley.

It would be too much to spoil if I revealed how this format plays out in each season of Happy Valley. Suffice to say, it follows a similar template and it does it very, very well. I couldn’t help but think about how much better each of these seasons was at being Fargo than Season 5 of Fargo.

Of course, it’s not as funny as Fargo, though it does have moments of comic relief. Fargo relies a lot on gallows humor; in Happy Valley the funniest thing is that it’s got the word “happy” in the title. It is bleak. It is dark. Season 1, in particular, has some very disturbing stuff and I think deserves a very big trigger warning due to themes of sexual assault. It’s also what makes it so hard to stop watching, however, because you become so invested in what’s going on and so terrified of what might happen.

There was one episode—one scene, of one episode in any case—that had me so close to the edge of my seat I almost fell off. Other episodes had me in tears. It’s a harrowing ride, but one in which you really do care for the characters and what happens to them.

I’ve recommended a lot of mystery and detective shows lately, and I can say without hesitation this is one of the best out there. It’s less about solving a mystery, however, and more about seeing how it plays out. I often prefer mysteries that I have to solve along with the detectives, but Happy Valley’s scripts are so tight and its story so well-crafted that I was just as engrossed as even the best mysteries.

Here in the US you can watch Happy Valley with an AMC+ subscription as it is no longer on Netflix (I have an AMC+ subscription via Amazon Prime Video). I believe the series is available on the BBC in the UK. Wherever it is in your area or region, do yourself a favor and go watch it. Seriously, it’s one of the best—and truest—detective shows I’ve seen in a long time. Cawood is the character Jodie Foster’s Danvers was trying to be in Night Country, but far more layered and complex. Where Danvers had just one note, Cawood is a symphony of warring emotions. That’s what a great script combined with brilliant acting can achieve.

• Check out my list of great mystery shows here.
• Read why Deadloch is such a fun comedic mystery here.
• Read why Mare Of Easttown is so damn good right here.

Have you watched Happy Valley? What did you think? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.