Make sure you see Happy Valley, Line of Duty, Better Call Saul. Plus a film as bonus.

It’s always a pleasure when a TV series improves from one season to the next. That’s been the case of three we’ve watched recently.

What makes Happy Valley so gripping is that the characters are believable. This is particularly true of the lead, Police Sergeant Catherine Cawood (played by Sarah Lancashire), someone it wouldn’t be at all surprising to meet in the aisle of a local supermarket. Or, more accurately, a local supermarket in a small Yorkshire town – Lancashire fits perfectly into the setting of the series, both by accent and by attitude.

Catherine Cawood: a great invention in TV fiction
Not always bubbling over with joy

The first season was compelling and well-constructed but perhaps depended a little too much on the shock and spectacle of a series of scenes of violence (not gratuitous but nonetheless graphic). The second season does far better: the violence is much more sparing, if just as shocking, and far more is made of the interchanges between everyday characters dealing with difficult situations.

Prostitutes are being murdered and shamefully mutilated in a Yorkshire village. Meanwhile the son of a widowed sheep farmer is being picked on by local youths who are making his life a misery. Sadly, the police can do little about it, not even Sergeant Cawood. She is, in any case, increasingly drawn into the murder investigation, and into the related crime of people-trafficking for the purposes of prostitution – one of the most engaging themes of the series is her work to protect one of the trafficked women.

What’s particularly baffling is that one of the murders, though it involves the same kind of mutilation, doesn’t fit the pattern. We the viewers know why it’s different; the police, however, assume that it is just one more in the same series, and not just because of a failure on their part, but because they’re being deliberately misled.

What links all these threads is Cawood, who begins to pull them together (even the sheep farmers) – while at the same time having to deal with the latest vicious persecution by the man who drove her daughter to suicide after leaving her pregnant. Despite being in gaol, is able to exercise a terrible threatening pressure on Cawood, her family and friends through a woman who has fallen under his spell – played by one of the least sinister of actors, Shirley Henderson, who managers for the purposes of this role to be one of the most sinister of characters.

The third season of Line of Duty has proved to be by far the best so far. Again, there is less violence than in the earlier seasons, though it’s by no means violence-free: indeed, the season starts with a criminal fleeing from an armed police unit, whose leader is the first to catch up with him – and then executes him in deliberate cold blood. He orders his team to cover up for him, but the anti-corruption unit AC-12 smells a rat and starts an investigation. Another brutal murder, this time involving torture also occurs – and then, to our consternation, one of the AC-12 officers, Detective Inspector Matt Cottan (Craig Parkinson), the one we’d learned to suspect from the earlier seasons, destroys a piece of evidence.

Martin Compston and Vicky McClure
Excellent in Line of Duty, though also not a bundle of laughs

Meanwhile, Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes), the detective gaoled by the unit at the end of season 2, is appealing her conviction. That case is reopened, leaving poor Detective Sergeant Arnott (Martin Compston) under suspicion himself – at least of incompetence. Adrian Dunbar is once again brilliant as the tormented, deeply principle commander of AC-12, Superintendent Ted Hastings, and Arnott’s colleague, Detective Constable Kate Fleming, superbly played by Vicky McClure, steals the show in the last episode.

That episode is dominated by two great examples of the kind of scene the series does best –interrogations – and, more sadly, an unintentionally hilarious car chase. It ends up with McClure chasing the criminals’ SUV on foot. Fortunately, the SUV manages to travel round in circles for several minutes, giving her several cracks at shooting at it. It’s quite an amusing scene, and helps create a good ending, but it lacks – well, credibility.

Jonathan Banks and Bob Odenkirk
Better Call Saul: plenty of dry humour

The second season of Better Call Saul was also a great improvement over the first, already impressive enough. This is a spinoff from Breaking Bad, but based around two of the secondary characters – principally Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill (later ‘Saul’), who went from a young man dabbling in crime, to postroom employee in his brother’s law firm, to lawyer in his own right. In this season, he’s getting going as a lawyer with his girlfriend Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), against the wishes and devious resistance of his own brother. He’s already more than willing to bend or break the rules to advance the interests of people he cares for, or his own.

His life also repeatedly touches on that of ex-policeman Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) constantly obliged to swim in the shark-infested waters of the local drug gangs, with their ruthless viciousness. But he proves himself repeatedly fully equipped with excellent teeth himself and more than prepared to use them himself – with great skill.

Three great series. If you haven’t see them, make a point of it.

PS – a fine film to go with the series: While you’re at it, see if you can get a look at The Wipers Times. Wipers is what the British Tommy called Ypres, in North West Belgium, scene of some of the more blood-drenched incidents of the blood-drenched First World War.

A Captain Frederick Roberts (played by Ben Chaplin) and Lieutenant John Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt), of the 12th Batallion of the Sherwood Foresters, came across an abandoned printing press. They decided to get a newspaper out for the troops. Since they were subject to transfers, what started as the Wipers Times later became the Somme Times and various other Times, even at the end of the war, Better Times. It was irreverent and magnificently funny. An example:

Realizing Men must laugh,
Some Wise Man devised the Staff :
Dressed them up in little dabs
Of rich variegated tabs :
Taught them how to win the War On A.F.Z. 354 :
Let them lead the Simple Life
Far from all our vulgar strife :
Nightly gave them downy beds
For their weary, aching heads :
Lest their relatives might grieve
Often, often gave them leave,
Decorations too, galore :
What on earth could man wish more?
Yet, alas, or so says Rumour,
He forgot a sense of Humour!

The film, a drama based on the real events, captures all of this rich mix and is well worth seeing.

The Wipers Times editorial staff

Things to watch, things not to watch: a tormented US cop, wily Soviets, wily Americans, bad Englishmen in Australia, a saintly Englishman in Cornwall

Nothing here to educate or edify, no gritty realism or insightful analysis: these are just series that entertain. Or, in at least one case, don’t.

Made specifically for Amazon and available to stream: Bosch. A lot of fun, if you like this genre, and it is entirely generic. The tormented middle-aged LAPD detective, hated by his superiors who are plotting against him. Above them are remoter superiors who plot and counterplot to further their careers, and are loyal to the eponymous Bosch only when it suits their plotting. He is, naturally, divorced with a clear implication that it was against his choice, and still is; he of course has a teenage daughter who’d like to see more of him. He’s incredibly attractive to significantly younger women (he’s in his forties), but can’t establish a lasting relationship with any of them. He is, of course, a maverick, frequently ignoring process and pushing regulations to their limits. From time to time he’s even in serious trouble as his enemies argue that he’s pushed beyond them.

The picture says it all
Bosch (Titus Welliver):  the tough man tough criminals do well to avoid

Throw into the mix a soulless serial killer who likes to taunt him down the phone, and you have a structure which you will, of course, entirely recognise. This particular instance of it is well acted and well directed, and can give you hours of innocent fun with the occasional jolt to keep you awake – if, as I said, you like the genre at all.

Also available on Amazon at the moment is The Americans. Naturally, as the name implies, the protagonists are absolutely not Americans. They are in fact Soviet spies, living as Americans, in the US. You’ll be amazed at how well the actors playing these parts speak English, or rather American; this actually is a little amazing for the male lead, who really isn’t American, but from a US point of view English, though in reality he’s Welsh.

The Russian spies in The Americans:
Matthew Rhys, who's Welsh, and Keri Russell who actually is American

The Russians who are openly Russian speak Russian, which is a great little touch of realism. It’s pretty much the only touch, however. The sleeper spies get away with murder (sometimes literally): people see their faces, they frequently engage in their nefarious activities in the open, even in daylight; one imagines that in reality they’d have been caught in about three weeks, instead of lasting for years (there’s a long backstory to the series). Still, there are some interesting characters, well acted, and gripping incidents. It’s also fun to watch a series where the bad guys are good guys – and the writing works well, making us sympathise with them. I did, however, keep wondering how long the series could last: the first two seasons are set at the start of the 80s, with the Soviet Union having less than a decade to survive. Will the spies be scrambling for the exit at the end of season 9, if there is a season 9?

Season 3 of House of Cards, on Netflix, has all the pace, the panache and the performance of the first two seasons. Plenty of wit and action as well, to keep us hooked and watching. Sadly, it doesn’t have anything like the same quality of story line. Manipulation of events by ruthless, amoral people was the guiding theme of the first two seasons, and what gave the series its character; that’s sadly played down in season 3. Indeed Claire Underwood, wife of the manipulator in chief and not far behind him in wiliness, seems to have been reinvented as a somewhat more moral character, which sadly makes her a lot less interesting.

Lars Mikkelsen, even more sinister as a Russian President than Putin
With Kevin Spacey, outstanding as ever

On the other hand, excellent acting by Lars Mikkelsen, Danish but convincing as a Russian at least to my ear, doing a wholly Putinesque performance as the Russian president, is almost enough on its own to justify watching the season.

I can’t say the same about the BBC series Banished, about the first white Australians – who, as Australians never tire of telling me, were selected by some of the best judges in England. The series is set in the first convict colony in New South Wales, and there’s plenty of good stuff about the setting and living conditions (rations are constantly being cut, and there are some curious consequences of having a community of 1000 men with 200 women). Still, the plot is painfully predictable and unimpressive, and leads to an ending which I won’t spoil, even though I could hardly do it more harm than it does itself. Pretty colours, though, and pretty people (yes, those English judges must have been good on beauty as well as crime), and the kind of thing you could watch while tired and having a few drinks: if you fall asleep, you’ll have no trouble catching up: what happened while you were out was exactly what you imagined was going to happen.

MyAnna Buring, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Russell Tovey in Banished
 Good acting but an indifferent script

Finally, also on the BBC, we have Poldark. And here we can kiss gritty realism entirely goodbye – and it doesn’t matter. This is pure fairy tale, pure escapism. Right from the start. Poldark himself has just come back to his native Cornwall from fighting, under British colours, in the American War of Independence – and comments that he felt he’d been on the wrong side. Yeah, right. An English landowner (impoverished, maybe, but a gentleman nonetheless, in the late eighteenth century when being a gentleman really meant belonging to an elite), who sympathises with a democratic cause – at a time when the word “democrat” was a term of abuse?

This man is a saint. So lie back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy a series with about as much connection to reality as Walt Disney’s Snow White. Taken in that way, it has great entertainment value and won’t disappoint. But only if taken that way…

The smouldering Aidan Turner, complete with fetching war scar
In an unchallenging but amusing fairy tale Poldark