At the end of Season 2 of “Happy Valley,” Katherine Kawood (Sarah Lancashire) watches her 9-year-old grandson, Ryan, run up a hill and smash the grass with a stick. Her expression is grim and Ryan’s father is in jail for murder.
The first time we see Ryan (Rhys Kona) in the third and final season of the show, which premieres Mondays on AMC+, BBC America and Acorn TV, Katherine sees him again. The 16-year-old now plays soccer and yells at his teammates from his position on goal. His grandmother, a police officer, has a similarly worried look on her face.
First broadcast in the UK and US in 2014, ‘Happy Valley’ number one Its complex portrayal of intersecting family loyalties and police work in a rural community has made it one of the most popular TV dramas of the last decade.
These issues are both personal and professional for Catherine. Haunted by the suicide of her daughter Becky, she is raising Becky’s son, Ryan, the product of a rape by Becky’s murderous ex-boyfriend, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton). She desperately tries to keep Tommy and Ryan apart.
Tommy may be serving a life sentence, but in the second season, one of his accomplices convinced Ryan to start writing letters to his father. With the seven-year gap between seasons and Ryan’s approaching adulthood, the show’s creator Sally Wainwright said that considering the question that has plagued Katherine since the first episode: his ancestry, Ryan’s What kind of man will he grow up to be?
The fact that the BBC, which produced the show, agreed to such a long hiatus between seasons proves Wainwright’s status as one of Britain’s best TV writers. BBC executive Charlotte Moore, who commissioned the first season of ‘Happy Valley’, said in a recent telephone interview that it would be easy to agree to cancel but the decision carries risks.
“God, I’m worried, will people forget about it?” she said. “Will people care? Will they live up to their expectations?”
Seven years is a long time on television, but not so long in city life. On a foggy day in April 2022 during the filming of Season 3, the Hebden Bridge looks just like it did the last time “Happy Valley” was filmed, with low clouds covering dark brick houses and lush green hills. surrounded. According to Norton, the natural beauty of this location, West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, is a big part of the show’s appeal.
“It’s a very special, but strange place here,” he said in an interview between scenes at Hebdenbridge City Hall. “It has something to do with it.”
The show’s title is a nod to the area’s local police, a play on the fact that crime and poverty abound far from the wealthy inhabitants of the sunny side of the valley. It is a thing.
The Yorkshire setting is a hallmark of Wainwright’s work, having grown up in the area and also having the comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax set nearby. At Hebden Bridge, filming ‘Happy Valley’ is old news. An elderly woman approached the production staff and asked about the cop cars gathering for the scene outside Katherine’s house, and although she knew why the cop cars were there, she said, “This all happened yesterday. I thought it was,” she said angrily.
But it was unusual for the actors to return to Happy Valley after such a long hiatus, and after season two won a slew of BAFTA awards.
“It’s really interesting to work on this,” Norton said. “What the hell happened to the characters in those seven years?” There’s also a certain amount of pressure given how long viewers have been waiting for this final series, he added.
Perhaps this is most true of Kona, who plays Ryan. “One of the reasons they waited so long was for me to grow up,” the now 18-year-old actor said in a recent Zoom interview. “What if I go in there and ruin the whole scene by not being able to act?”
In some ways, Kona’s own experience being on the show reflects how Ryan frames the details of his own life as he grows up. The actor was only 8 years old when he started filming ‘Happy Valley’ and was 10 when season 2 aired. Much of what happens on the show is not suitable for children.
“Given the subject matter as a whole, I only saw my part, and almost all the storylines that weren’t directly related to my scenes,” he said. He recently watched full episodes and learned exactly what happens in “Happy Valley.”
In Season 3, Ryan, and especially whether he grows up to share the same violent tendencies as his father, will be the main focus of the show. “At the end of the second series, what was left for us was that he could go one of two ways,” Wainwright said in a recent video interview. “That’s what this series explores—what path he took. To me, it’s always been about what happens when Ryan finds out more about his parents.” “
Wainwright always planned to take a long vacation before the final season to give the aging Ryan more leeway with this choice.
“There are things Ryan couldn’t do when he was a kid,” Kona said. “But when he turns 16, there are even more actions the character can take.”
The show not only explores how horrific acts of violence inflict trauma on victims, but also how the perpetrators of these acts act in response to their own conflicts. “Sally wants to admit that she had a horrible childhood and was raised in an abusive home,” Norton said.
In preparation for the first season, Wainwright and Norton met with a criminal psychologist to “establish a boy who experienced extreme trauma in his early childhood,” Norton said. I will do my best to keep that control. “
The world has changed since the last series aired. Of course there was the coronavirus, but there is no pandemic in the new season. (“They’re good enough to deal with,” Norton joked about the “Happy Valley” characters.) More relevant to the show is how police in the US and UK have faced new surveillance in recent years. And some believe that police always represent the best interests of the public to serve.
Wainwright has worked closely with various female police officers in the production of Manchester-based detective dramas Happy Valley and Scott and Bailey, which aired in the UK from 2011 to 2016.
“They are women who really care about their work and are really exemplary police officers,” she said.but recently discussion Thoughts about systemic sexism and a culture of violence, especially in the London police, stopped her. “This series is the only one where I started to worry that I wasn’t critical enough of the culture within the police force,” she said.
However, while the main characters in Happy Valley are police officers, the ethics of each character are ambiguous. No one is universally good, nor universally evil.
“Katherine is never perfect. She can be scary,” said Wainwright. “Tommy can do things that are very nice or look very nice, and it’s about exploring those qualities that are in both.”
Norton said the heart of “Happy Valley”‘s popularity lies in the story of how families come together despite the lingering effects of trauma and the fact that they sometimes hurt each other.
“Everyone can relate to that scene of spending time around the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea, or thousands of cups,” he says. “Sally’s strength is that she captures all the complexities and contradictions of a family, and I think that’s something people can really tap into.”
This final season’s conclusion raises the question of whether Happy Valley is optimistic or pessimistic about whether families like the Korwk family will finally heal from collective trauma, or whether the past will continue to haunt them. Wainwright said it would be resolved.
“It has a very clear, well-defined end,” she said. “It falls to one side.”
