The Most Compelling Female Character on Television

The last time we saw Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, she was trying—and quite magnificently failing—to capture one of her police-force colleagues, the nebbishy John Wadsworth, who’d finally been implicated in the murder of his lover. The pursuit is a bleak comedy of errors: Directed by her superiors not to pursue John down train tracks, Catherine mutters “bollocks” and follows him anyway. The pair end up on a bridge in relentless rain. Catherine, who says that she’s never trained in negotiation, asks John—who’s successfully talked down 17 people from various ledges—what to say to compel him not to jump. She has to keep him talking, John says. “You’ve got to be assertive. Reassuring. Empathetic and kind. And you’ve got to listen.” Catherine tells John to take his time, that she’ll be there. His face discernibly changes. “I love my kids,” he tells her; he propels himself backward.

The scene is wrenching, down to the strangled noise Catherine makes when John jumps, the way she crumples to the ground. It also doesn’t make sense. On Happy Valley (whose third and final season arrived last week on AMC+ and BBC America), a grim, comic crime drama set in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, Catherine does nothing but negotiate. In the show’s first scene, she banters fluently with a heartbroken drunk man who’s threatening to set himself on fire; in later episodes, she pleads with a mother to call her if her fugitive son comes home, and convinces a family whose daughter has been kidnapped that getting the police involved is their only viable option. Throughout the series, language is her power and her sharpest weapon. She speaks, or she refuses to. (No one on television exercises the silent treatment with more terrifying hostility.) We’re left with the ghost of a suspicion, then, that her failure to save John might not actually have been a failure at all.

Ever since she made her TV debut in 2014, Catherine—played by Sarah Lancashire and written through all three seasons by Sally Wainwright—has been the rarest of unicorns anchoring a series: an ordinary, middle-aged woman written with such care and breadth that she becomes extraordinary. Over the past few decades, the phrase strong female character has come to stand for various sticky archetypes in popular culture: the corseted, ponytailed warrior; the brilliant professional with a catastrophic personal life; the train wreck turning her trauma into art. Viewers wanted characters imbued with narrative and psychological complexity; we got exposed abs, Claire Danes’s cry face, rote and exhausting arguments over “likability.” But, with Happy Valley, we also got Catherine: fearless, moody, perceptive, abrasive, indispensable. The show makes no apologies for her. The more she errs, the more interesting she is to watch.

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If Happy Valley were just a character study, it would still be enthralling. (In Britain, when the series aired its final episode earlier this year, a whopping 7.5 million people watched live, and many more streamed it later.) But the series has a bigger theme in mind—one that the seven-year gap since it last aired has only helped draw out. Men in the show tend to be frail, often damagingly so; in all three seasons, a small man, feeling humiliated, makes a terrible decision that precipitates catastrophe. The recurring metaphor is clear: Men set fires, and women put them out. The show is fascinated with ideas of weakness and strength (“Man up, princess,” Catherine tells her partner as they approach one especially nasty crime scene), with how resentment can corrode a person’s humanity but how surviving can too. Some people endure, Happy Valley insists, not because they’re superhuman but simply because there are no other options.

In Season 1, Catherine introduces herself to the lighter-wielding drunk man matter-of-factly: “I’m Catherine, by the way. I’m 47. I’m divorced. I live with my sister, who’s a recovering heroin addict. I’ve got two grown children—one dead, one who don’t speak to me—and a grandson.” Catherine’s daughter, Becky, is buried in the same graveyard as Sylvia Plath, with all the inferences that association offers—like Plath, Becky died by suicide. She had been abused and assaulted by a drug dealer named Tommy Lee Royce (played by James Norton), who gets out of prison in the show’s first episode, and whose freedom presses on Catherine until she can hardly breathe. What Tommy doesn’t yet know is that Catherine is raising his son, Ryan (Rhys Connah), and what we soon learn is that her decision to take Ryan on cost her her marriage and her relationship with her only surviving child.

Ryan, a sweet, serious boy in Seasons 1 and 2 and a surly but loving teenager in the final season, is the battleground for the show’s philosophical and physical scrimmages. A cloud hangs over Catherine’s life with him—the question of whether he could have inherited Tommy’s cruelty, his pathological narcissism, the joy he takes in hurting people. But Tommy is uniquely broken on the show (and Norton plays him with spectacularly rich malevolence); most other characters who hurt people do so much more ordinarily. In the end, no one on Happy Valley is an island. You can observe in virtually every scene how people’s actions ripple out into the broader community, whether an influx of cheap drugs sold from ice-cream trucks or the casual disdain with which Catherine bullies a subordinate.

One of the things that makes Season 3 so rich, in fact, is that Catherine is discernibly harder as a character. Facing her last day after 30 years on the force, she tells her sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), “Most police officers die within five years of retirement, maybe because they can’t let go—I don’t know. Me, I’m counting the seconds.” She’s proud of her service, and yet it seems to have eaten away at her—seeing the brutality and the wasted lives, facing the Sisyphean burden of trying to salvage a community that drugs flow through like water. “Every day we have to deal with kids off their heads on whatever rubbish they can find to inject themselves with, and it never stops,” she says in the first season. “It just never stops.” By Season 3, the drugs have changed—prescription pills are edging out heroin, reflecting reality in the country’s north—but the consequences are the same. All Catherine can ever do is clean up the mess.

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Watching Mare of Easttown in 2021, I didn’t quite piece together at the time how much the HBO miniseries emulated Happy Valley from top to toe: the grieving mother raising her grandchild, the police officer who makes grievous mistakes and yet is—in lieu of any better alternative—the linchpin of her community. Men are weak on Mare, too; they hurt people and then fall apart when it’s time to face what they’ve wrought. The show’s central character, played by Kate Winslet, was critiqued for particular abuses of her power that, as one reviewer wrote, “aren’t as easy to forgive as the show seems to think they are.” But the point, I think, was that they shouldn’t be forgiven. It matters that we have female characters on television who can be fully, painfully awful, even while they’re also the very reason we’re watching. Catherine is grandiose and bitter. In rage, she intentionally says things to people she loves that she knows will tear them wide open. But doing so doesn’t make her “bad,” whatever that means. She’s a character who doesn’t need to exist on either side of a good-bad binary, because people—messy, kind, traumatized people—generally don’t either. She’s flawed, and she’s riveting. One last outing with her is a gift.