George and I just finished viewing the 6-part series Happy Valley which was originally broadcast on BBC and is now available in the United States through Netflix. As Sergeant Catherine Cawood, Sarah Lancashire gave a brilliant performance. The series is very satisfying because of the interesting characters as well as due to the narrative pacing. One episode depicts the experience of depression better than any other tv show or movie I’ve seen. (Melancholia may be close, but that movie is so surreal, it doesn’t have the same impact as seeing it in Happy Valley.) An overarching theme relates to responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences for those actions, and how each character addresses this is very interesting.
At times, I couldn’t understand the dialogue. It reminded me of a movie, maybe a documentary, set in England that Anna and I watched back in our Chicago days. Although it was an english-language film, the particular dialect of the characters required the film to use subtitles. In this case, though, the difficulty had less to do with how the characters spoke and more to do with how I process sounds.
I was very glad to learn there will be a second season for the drama.
