The Third and Final Season of ‘Happy Valley’ Is Crime TV at Its Finest

It opens in grimness, on an airborne shot of a Yorkshire landscape so clotted with fog and wet and mud that you instantly know you’d rather be anywhere else. The weather alone makes a joke of the title—Happy Valley—but so will the human remains found in a reservoir, the forbidding tower blocks where the police aren’t welcome, the ubiquity of drug use, and finally the criminal in a high-security prison, with the long hair and the feral smile: Tommy Lee Royce, but more on him in a second.

What makes this bleak corner of Yorkshire a place you want to be, what makes Happy Valley a crime drama you’ll need to watch all three seasons of—the third and final of which begins tonight on BBC America, and streams on AMC+ and Acorn TV—is Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), the unfathomably tough police sergeant at the heart of it all. Crime television is littered with damaged, brilliant police officers—Jane Tennison, Jimmy McNulty, Rust Cohle, just to name the three that come quickest to mind—but none of them are as fascinating a paradox as Cawood, an officer so hardened by life and so vulnerable and open-hearted that you don’t know whether to be scared of her or in love in with her (most people are both). She’s nearing retirement at the start of this final season, intending to hike the Himalayas—but no one retires easily in crime television. There’s always a last case.