Happy Valley’s classy finale — and the legacy it leaves

In the end, we never got to see Sarah Lancashire’s police sergeant drive off in her Land Rover and embark on her planned retirement trip to the Himalayas; it was enough that she emerged from her last day at work alive. The final ever episode of Happy Valley brought the long-awaited showdown between Catherine Cawood (Lancashire) and Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), the violent psychopath who raped her daughter and drove her to suicide. “We’ve had another bit of a tussle,” Cawood told her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran), which is one way of describing the face-off in her kitchen that culminated in Royce, already injured with a stab wound, setting himself on fire.

The popularity of Happy Valley is such that it could run and run — the first episode of this third series drew 11.3mn UK viewers — but its creator, Sally Wainwright, is too classy to allow it to outstay its welcome. When it launched in 2014, Luther and Sherlock were the UK’s biggest crime series — but who needs brooding male sleuths in statement overcoats when we have Lancashire in a hi-vis police vest dispatching local thugs with an exasperated eye-roll?

With Cawood, Wainwright has given us a new kind of TV cop, a fiftysomething woman who hasn’t got time for your nonsense. It’s no wonder the US detective series Mare of Easttown so blatantly plundered Happy Valley, featuring as it did a grumpy, middle-aged heroine grieving a dead child and left alone to raise her grandson.

All credit to Wainwright, too, for creating a three-dimensional monster in Royce, the kind of man who pauses to admire a view while fleeing police following an audacious escape in the middle of a court appearance. Royce had wanted his son Ryan, born from the rape of Cawood’s daughter, to go on the run with him in Spain. But, after breaking into Cawood’s house, he realised that she had given Ryan a secure and loving home — something that he, the child of an addict, never experienced. If, by acknowledging this, Royce was offering Cawood an olive branch, she was in no mood to accept it, calling him a “fucked-up, frightened, damaged, deluded, nasty little toddler brain in a big man’s body”.

One of the joys of Happy Valley is its quiet subversion of cop show clichés. Has there ever been a slower car chase than the one in which Cawood tailed her sister as she took Ryan on a sneaky trip to visit Royce in jail? All remained comfortably within the speed limit, yet the tension was real. It has also allowed us to bask in dialogue that combines the profound and the mundane, such as when Catherine delivers an impassioned speech to Ryan about his father’s psychopathic tendencies, and he responds by telling her his tea will be getting cold. “What you having?” she asks. “Stew,” he replies. “That’ll be all right,” she says, before resuming her lecture.

These moments of levity are a counterweight to the darkness and dread elsewhere, seen in a PE teacher delivering sadistic beatings to his young wife and a crime lord visiting brutal revenge on a lackey who has cost him money. If there has been one mis-step, it’s in the character of Faisal (Amit Shah), a nervy pharmacist whose dealings with a diazepam-reliant neighbour took a grisly turn and whose Mr Bean-style bumbling struck a cartoonish note in a series celebrated for its realism.

As ever, the standout performance comes from Lancashire, playing Cawood as a beacon of forbearance and survival, for which she has already been festooned with awards; on the strength of this final outing, she will doubtless bag a few more. As Cawood put it earlier in the series, sardonically using police-speak for going off-duty: “I’m the best copper that ever lived but, code 11, job done.”

On BBC iPlayer in the UK now. Season 3 will debut on BBC America, AMC+ and Acorn TV in the US in May

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