Happy Valley: Season 1 (2014)

If anything has characterised the 2013-2014 television season in a global way, it’s been a drive towards exploring new ways to envisage horror as a longform, televisual genre. Along with an unprecedented number of new horror, fantasy and supernatural franchises, well-established series such as American Horror Story have finally been met with significant critical acclaim, while ancillary genres, such as medical melodrama, have aspired to new levels of visceral and gruesome involvement. It’s perhaps not surpising, then, that one of the most successful experiments in televisual horror has come from way outside the horror genre, in the form of a gritty BBC One crime drama about a jaded Yorkshire policewoman, Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lanchashire), who’s forced to face her demons when her daughter’s rapist is released from prison. Set against the same windswept, cavernous landscapes as Sally Wainwright’s previous drama, Last Tango in Halifax, it’s almost unbearably brutal, traumatic and suspenseful, not unlike some of the more shocking moments in Minette Walters’ miniseries’ of the 90s. Virtually all of the violence is directed at women in one way or another, while the sheer amount of ambient, unsatisfied misogyny is almost stifling, gathering around the breathtaking aerial establishing shots like a low pressure system, and centrifuging every sight line until it feels like women can only afford to lock eyes with men over their shoulders, just as Catherine seems to have her greatest epiphanies while glancing in her rear-vision mirrors. Part of the pleasure of procedural television is that it at least envisages the possibility of equality before procedure, but Happy Valley is a series in which sexism is curiously uncontained by the bureaucratic structures surrounding Catherine’s investigation, which gradually spirals out to encompass the abduction of a local industrialist’s daughter, as well as the Yorkshire drug trade. If anything, procedure unleashes bottled-up misogyny like an occult, contagious force, as Wainwright’s narrative pretty much subsists on women being blamed for perceived failures or aberrations of procedure, women forced to take the burden for a procedural system that’s absolutely rotten. Black-eyed and bloodshot for most of the series, Catherine stumbles through that as best she can, but even the slightly staid concluding montage sequence doesn’t really suggest she’s succeeded – like films that end with characters waking up from a bad dream, it merely over-compensates for a series that nails procedural horror so perfectly that it leaves nothing left to process, no safe haven or avenue of escape.