At the end of Season 2 of “Happy Valley,” Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) sees her 9-year-old grandson Ryan running up a hill and hitting the grass with a stick. Her expression is serious and Ryan’s father is in prison for murder.
The first time we see Ryan (Rhys Connah) in the third and final season of the show, which premieres Monday on AMC+, BBC America and Acorn TV, Catherine is watching him again. Now 16, he plays football and yells furiously at his teammates from his position in goal. His grandmother, a policewoman, has the same worried look on her face.
“Happy Valley”, which first aired in the UK and US in 2014, has been called one of the best television dramas of the past decade for its complex depiction of family loyalty and police work intersecting in a rural community.
These issues are both personal and professional for Catherine: Haunted by the suicide of her daughter, Becky, she raises Ryan, Becky’s son, who was the product of rape by Becky’s murderous ex-boyfriend, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), while desperately trying to keep Tommy and Ryan apart.
Tommy may be in prison serving a life sentence, but in the second season, one of his accomplices persuaded Ryan to start writing his father. The seven-year break between seasons and Ryan’s approaching adulthood allow Sally Wainwright, the show’s creator, to dig deep into the question that has plagued Catherine since the very first episode: What kind of man will Ryan become? , given his origin?
The fact that the BBC, which produced the show, agreed to such a long break between seasons is a testament to Wainwright’s status as one of Britain’s top TV writers. Charlotte Moore, a BBC executive who commissioned the first season of “Happy Valley,” said in a recent telephone interview that while it was easy to agree to the breakup, the decision did come with risks.
“You worry, God, will people forget?” she said. “Are people going to care, will it live up to expectations?”
Seven years is a long time on television, but not that long in the life of a city. On a foggy day in April 2022, during the filming of the third season, Hebden Bridge looked unchanged since the last time “Happy Valley” was shot, with lush green hills surrounding houses of blackened bricks under a low cloud cover. According to Norton, the natural beauty of this location, the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, is a big part of the show’s appeal.
“It’s a very special but strange place,” he said in an interview between scenes at Hebden Bridge Town Hall. “There’s an edge to it.”
The show takes its title from the nickname of the local police for the area, an ironic nod to the fact that crime and poverty are rampant outside the affluent residents on the sunny side of the valley.
A Yorkshire setting is a hallmark of Wainwright’s work, who grew up in the area and also set her comedy drama “Last Tango in Halifax” nearby. In Hebden Bridge, filming “Happy Valley” is old news. When an elderly woman approached production staff to ask about the police cars assembled for a scene outside Catherine’s house, she knew why they were there, but exasperatedly said, “I thought this all happened yesterday.”
However, it was unusual for the actors to return to “Happy Valley” after such a long hiatus – and after season 2 won a slew of British Academy Film Awards, or BAFTAs.
“It’s really interesting to wrestle with,” Norton said. “What the hell happened to the characters in those seven years?” There’s also a certain amount of pressure, he added, given how long audiences have been waiting for this latest series.
This is perhaps most true for Connah, who plays Ryan. “One of the reasons they waited so long was because I was going to grow up,” the actor, now 18, said in a recent Zoom interview. “What if I went there and couldn’t act and ruined all the scenes?”
Connah’s own experience of being on the show in some ways mirrored how Ryan pieced together details about his own life as he grew up. The actor was just 8 when he started filming “Happy Valley,” 10 when season 2 aired. Much of what happens on the show is not appropriate for a child.
“I just watched my own bits given the whole subject, so pretty much any storyline that wasn’t directly related to my scenes I had never seen,” he said. He’s only recently watched the full episodes and learned exactly what happens in “Happy Valley.”
In Season 3, Ryan — and specifically whether he’ll grow up to share his father’s violent tendencies — becomes the main focus of the show. “The feeling we had at the end of the second series was that he could have gone one of two ways,” Wainwright said in a recent video interview. “That’s what this series explores: which way he went. For me, it was always about what would happen if Ryan found out about his parents.”
Wainwright had always planned to take a long hiatus before the final season so that an older Ryan would have more agency in this choice.
“There are things he couldn’t have done when Ryan was a kid,” Connah said. “But when he’s 16, it opens up more actions for the character to take.”
The show explores not only how horrific acts of violence traumatize victims, but also how the perpetrators of these acts often act in response to their own struggles. Tommy is humanized as much as possible or desirable to humanize a rapist and murderer.
In preparation for the first season, Wainwright and Norton met with criminal psychologists to “track down a boy who had experienced extreme trauma as a young child,” Norton said, “and since he’s grown up and taken control, he will he will never relinquish that control, and will do everything he can to hold on to it.”
The world has changed since the last series aired. There was the coronavirus, of course, but the pandemic is absent in the new season. (“They’ve got enough to deal with,” Norton joked about the “Happy Valley” characters.) What’s more pertinent to the show is that police forces in both the U.S. and Britain have come under renewed scrutiny in recent years. have been taken, with some doubt whether the police always represent the interests of the public they are supposed to serve.
Wainwright has worked closely with several female police officers in the creation of ‘Happy Valley’ and ‘Scott and Bailey’, her Manchester police drama which aired in Britain between 2011 and 2016.
“They are women who really care about their jobs, really exemplary police officers,” she said. But recent discussions about institutional sexism and a culture of violence in the London police in particular have given her pause. “It’s only in this current series that I’m starting to worry that I’m not being critical enough of the culture within the police force,” she said.
But while the hero of “Happy Valley” is a cop, each character’s morality is attractively ambiguous. No one is universally good or universally bad.
“Catherine isn’t perfect by any means; she can be horrible,” said Wainwright. “Tommy can do things that are pretty nice, or seem really nice. And it’s about exploring those qualities in both.”
Central to the popularity of “Happy Valley,” Norton said, is its depiction of how families manage to stay together despite the lingering effects of trauma and despite family members sometimes hurting each other.
“Everyone can identify with those scenes around the kitchen table with a cup or thousands of cups of tea,” he said. “Sally’s strength is capturing all the complexities and contradictions of the family, and I think people can really tap into that.”
The end of this final season, Wainwright said, will resolve the question of whether “Happy Valley” is optimistic or pessimistic about whether a family like the Cawoods can finally heal from their collective trauma, or whether the past will continue to haunt them.
“It has a very, very clear and distinct ending,” she said. “It comes down on one side.”
