Why Is “Happy Valley” So Good? Because of Sally Wainwright’s Choices

I can imagine a lot of people not wanting to watch Happy Valley, the 2014 BBC series which is currently available to stream on Netflix in the U.S. For some people, “British” is enough of a description to rule out a program, as much as “black & white” may be. For others, used to the accents on Masterpiece Theatre, it may be the wrong kind of British, engaged as it is with the northern area of Yorkshire. (You’ll definitely want to use the closed captions, at least for the first few episodes.) Either course would be a mistake. Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, regardless of genre, is very good television, and very good storytelling, and it’s all because of the choices she made in the writing. (Note: big spoilers ahead.)

1. It’s a mystery that’s not a mystery. Whereas with Marple and Lynley and the rest, we tend to be as in-the-dark as our hero detectives right up until the end, Happy Valley is told more like The Wire: we have equal time among the “good guys” and “bad guys,” and the tension comes from seeing how close they come to each other before finally intersecting.

2. There are no “good guys” and “bad guys.” Happy Valley‘s setup, and even some of its execution, is similar to the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (the movie): petty and narcissistic businessman orchestrates the kidnapping of someone he knows in order to earn ransom money to pay a debt. And nothing that happens then, of course, goes according to plan.

The tweaks are important here: Whereas Jerry Lundegaard had his own wife kidnapped in order to pay off an existing debt, Happy Valley‘s Kevin Weatherill has his boss’ daughter kidnapped in order to pay off a future debt — Kevin wants to send his daughters to private school, but his current salary won’t accommodate it. Indeed, Kevin turns out to be the closest thing Happy Valley has to an evil character. I won’t disclose his fate, but I will say that amid all the torment, death, and chaos created by his plans, Kevin grows only more certain that what he’s done is the right thing. He refuses to accept responsibility for his actions, and that, according to Happy Valley, might be even worse than rape or murder.

Which is key, because the main villain would seem to be Tommy Lee Royce, one of the two kidnappers put on the job by Ashley Cowgill, owner of an RV (caravan) park and Kevin’s point-man for the crime. Tommy Lee is newly released from prison, has a history of rape (including the daughter of our hero, police sergeant Catherine Caewood), and takes real pleasure in finding new ways to torture the kidnapped girl in his possession. Tommy Lee, to Catherine and to us, is a monster, plain as day. Besides his record, there’s the fact that Catherine’s daughter killed herself shortly after giving birth to Tommy’s son, Ryan.

For the first half of the six-episode story, this is all we know of Tommy: he’s bad news and a psychopath. We see him murder, rape, and torment, all seemingly without remorse or conscience. Then, four episodes in, we meet Tommy’s alcoholic/cokehead mother, while Tommy finds out he has a son, and suddenly our perceptions of him change. He’s still not a good guy — he’s never a good guy — but between glimpses of the kind of neglect he had all his life, and his genuine fascination with his newfound offspring, we come to know Tommy a little bit, and that keeps him from being just another black-and-white killer. Instead, he’s a person who’s thought himself shit all his life who suddenly finds out he may have made something good into the world.

3. The male characters are ridiculous, and it rings all too true. Of course, while Ryan may be something good, and while Tommy had a hand in making him, Ryan was either the direct product of rape (this is made slightly more complicated later) or is at least the product of a rapist. Tommy’s a human monster, his co-kidnapper Lewis is a coward, Kevin is a narcissist, Nevison (father of the kidnapped girl) is a semi-heartless tycoon, Richard (Catherine’s ex-husband) is another kind of coward, and all her police bosses are ineffectual jagoffs. Richard redeems himself, I think, but the only male character who comes off as an actualized human being is Phil Crabtree, a detective Catherine calls in to help with the kidnapping investigation. Phil’s smart, competent, and clearly thinks highly of Catherine and her abilities.

4. The female characters are neither saintly nor simple. Catherine is a total mess, though not in the way we’re used to seeing. In American television (and a lot of British crime series, too) Catherine’s fractured personal life would be balanced with an undeniable brilliance in detecting. While she’s a good cop and a smart detective, there’s nothing superhuman about Catherine. This might be the most revelatory thing about Happy Valley: we’ve somehow arrived at a point in television where our detectives have to be brilliant, have to be the ones who notice fifty things invisible to the normal human eye, or we, I don’t know, won’t watch? Someone should test this sometime, because the norm is becoming unbearable. TO BE FAIR, there was a moment in the first episode where Catherine, calling for backup in chasing down a drug-peddling ice cream truck, rattles off physical descriptions of the two dealers that made me think, Oh, here we go. But then that was it, and the show really didn’t return to that territory again.

(Back to that good-and-evil/black-and-white business: is Catherine, in her all-excluding obsession to punish Tommy for her daughter’s death, really any better than Kevin? Or Ashley? Because she’s our main character, she’ll overcome it, but there are a lot of moments where it’s a close call.)

Likewise, Catherine’s sister and roommate, Clare, is a recovering heroin addict. We’re told that several times in the first episode, so there’s the Chekov’s Gun expectation that she’ll slip before things wrap up. Instead, I think Clare is remarkable for her even keel and her openness. Also, her desire to do good works results in the moment when Catherine first discovers she’s got a kidnapping, so she’s got that going for her.

5. It respects its viewer. I don’t think I knew, until halfway through the first episode, that Catherine was Ryan’s grandmother, not his mother. There’s a lot of stuff like that in Happy Valley, where exposition isn’t jammed in like a wedge — the scene where Catherine tells her whole story to a suicidal guy on a jungle gym plays as sly parody of this kind of thing — and where the story’s allowed to develop naturally instead of along some standard punchlist of beats. (We learn four episodes in that Catherine, whom we’ve known only as a uniformed cop, used to be a detective — that’s, again, information that’d be muttered by another cop purely as a way of cluing in the viewer. When we finally do hear this info in Happy Valley, we think: Well, that makes sense, yeah.)

Witness, also, the Big Climactic Moment, which comes not in episode six of six, but in episode four. Watching this, I thought: wait, this is happening now?! But in the aftermath, it was exciting because that Big Climactic Moment was not actually what the show is about. A thing like that forces you to reframe the story you’re watching or reading, and it’s enormously effective; it plays with our expectations of drama, and it reminds us that there’s more than one way to tell a story, especially while we’re living in a time that tends to believe there’s only one way.

6. It remembers to be funny. Or at least to acknowledge that things can be funny, even in the worst of circumstances. This is something I can go on about, I know, but it’s so important: in the most serious of stories, if you let just a little of the light in, it makes everything that much more substantial. God, the more light you let in, the darker you can even get. Isn’t that great?

But if you refuse to add humor or lightness anywhere, guess what? Your stuff, at some point, will suddenly wear the reader out. You will have become ponderous and self-important, and these things, while they may seem cool and “real,” are actually a bullshit kind of death in art. You can’t come back from them, and the reader will be left with a bad taste in their mouth, not unlike what happens when you eat a lot of pine nuts, or cook with rancid vegetable oil.

Happy Valley will definitely remind viewers, at first, of Fargo. But it most reminds me of Tana French, the Irish writer whose crime novels’ mysteries tend more to be about their detectives than about the actual criminal proceedings. (Start with In the Woods and go from there.) It also reminds me of Top of the Lake (female cop in personal transition stumbles into complicated trouble) and — mainly in its way of stringing out key information and respecting the viewer — Transparent. (Top of the Lake deserves its own post, and I’ll get to it soon; it’s the best thing I saw in 2013, and was a show that constantly subverted your expectations while remembering to reward you for your troubles.)

Happy Valley, of all the things I just mentioned, is also probably the most user-friendly. It feels, in the early going, like other things you’ve seen, and I think that’s not a mistake. Because once you’re onboard, strapped in and feeling comfy, it can then do what it needs to do. I hope we’re done, once and for all, with the “genre” ghettoization, because here’s yet another example of straight-up great storytelling that happens to feature crime.