Happy Valley season 3 revives British TV’s most badass grandma

There’s a special pleasure to be had from watching a character who is just aggressively competent go about their job. It helps if they have a sharp tongue, a short fuse, and don’t suffer fools gladly. Oh, the vicarious release of watching them Figure It Out and Get Shit Done — running rings around fatuous bosses and sloppy miscreants as they do it. They’re like a knife, cutting through the complications of life.

That’s part of the appeal of Sgt. Catherine Cawood is a middle-aged, no-nonsense policewoman with the Yorkshire Constabulary and star of the British police drama Happy ValleyThe third and final episode of the series is now airing on AMC Plus. BBC America and Acorn TV. Cawood is not a hotshot detective, she’s just a hardworking copper: a veteran of the street who knows every inch, every face, and every sob story in her beat in the bleakly picturesque hills of West Yorkshire in the north of England. Her appeal also comes from the fact that she’s the hardened mother of a broken family, who tries to keep it together with sheer willpower, but is not always successful. In the end, some of life’s complications can’t be cut through.

Cawood, the novel by Sally Wainwright was written with the help of her collaborator and actor Sarah Lancashire. Happy Valley Debuted in 2014. Had a second-season in 2016. Then vanished for 7 years as Wainwright worked on her historical queer romp Gentleman JackThe conclusion of her family drama Last Tango in Halifax. (Like nearly all Wainwright’s work, these shows were both set in her native Yorkshire, too.) It was a long and painful wait to see the third series. It is available in the U.K. Happy Valley is essential, appointment viewing: When the series finale aired in the U.K. earlier this year, it was watched by 11 million people — a big deal in a country with a population of 67 million.

Sgt. Cawood hasn’t been spared the passage of time. It’s seven years later in the show, too, which means that Cawood is close to retirement, and her grandson Ryan (Rhys Connah) has grown from a scrappy urchin into a rangy 16-year-old. Ryan has secretly been keeping in touch with his father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), a twisted criminal whom Cawood hates with a passion, blaming him for the death of her daughter, Ryan’s mother. She arrested Royce in season 1 for his involvement in a grim kidnapping-and-murder scheme, but only after a violent hand-to-hand battle that nearly ended her life. He manipulated Shirley Henderson, a woman who was enamoured with Ryan from behind prison bars. He’s still serving a life sentence, and still darkly obsessed with both his son and his son’s grandmother.

If this sounds histrionic and soapy on paper, it kind of is — Wainwright learned her trade on the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street In the 90s, she maintained her talent for punchy plots and sensationalist, suspenseful stories in more prestige work. However, these stories have a deep, humanistic, sarcastic, and down to earth humor. Characters are so well-drawn and realistically rendered that it feels like you already know them. Happy Valley throws in a gritty, almost Western flavor — like a kind of kitchen-sink Justification, if the cool cowboy marshal was a tired, permanently cross grandma who’s just sick of everyone’s shit.

Cawood, as the new season begins, is summoned to investigate the corpse found in a nearby quarry. It turns out that the body has ties with Royce, and could offer him a chance to have his sentence lowered. It also pulls in the season’s tangled knot of secondary plots, involving a violent gang of prescription drug dealers, a coercive football coach at Ryan’s school, the coach’s cowed wife who’s addicted to the drugs, and the pharmacist who supplies her.

Photo: Matt Squire/BBC, AMC

Wainwright’s season two tackled trafficking in Eastern European women for sex servitude, and this is the way he deals with the drug epidemic. Wainwright has a lot to say. Happy Valley never really feels like an issue show; it’s too focused on story, character, and community for that. Wainwright, while capable of writing monsters, is also interested (if she’s not even more) in a banal type of evil. Weak, selfish, family men that turn themselves into the worst acts of violence against women through a mix of incompetence or venality. Season 1 had Steve Pemberton as a put-upon employee who orchestrates the kidnapping of his boss’ daughter; season 2 had Kevin Doyle as a philandering police detective trying to cover his tracks; season 3 has Amit Shah as the pharmacist who feeds a young woman’s addiction.

Catherine Cawood’s vengeful angel is perfect to take down the cowardly and self-deceiving men. Catherine Cawood is a bitter, implacable woman who also has common sense and cares for others. She’s one of the great creations of Lancashire, a titan of TV acting who played a brassy barmaid on Coronation StreetFor 532 episode before becoming one of the leading British actors with the greatest magnetic power in middle age. She makes full use of her physical presence and piercing stare as Cawood. She’s a formidable force.

Cawood, however, is not always correct. She’s sometimes blinkered by her rage, particularly when it’s aimed at those she loves, and her determination turns into blind single-mindedness. Season 3 boldly puts her at loggerheads with those closest to her — her grandson Ryan and her recovering alcoholic sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) — when she discovers Ryan’s contact with Royce, which she views as a betrayal. Wainwright, Lancashire and the rest of the cast have been hesitant to loosen her up, so that they can show just how damaging the forces driving her crusade are.

The season goes for the dramatic jugular, and if it doesn’t quite tie its subplots together as satisfyingly as the two earlier seasons, that’s balanced by the Shakespearean dimensions of the storyline that brings Cawood, her family, and Royce together one last time. Wainwright has reservations about the cost of Catherine’s hatred, and even pity for her villain’s misplaced need to connect. As tough as Happy Valley is, it’s neither bleak nor bleeding-heart in its outlook. Some types of evil need to be fought. It’s sometimes the hard grandmother in high-visibility vest who is needed to put down evil.