Happy Valley

I can’t be doing with cop shows. Most of them are formulaic and unconvincing, even when hey try hard. “Without Sin” looked promising, had good actors, but I couldn’t get beyond the second episode. It’s all about Vicki McClure, minor characters and plot are twisted around, so as to provide further twists, without any concern for detail or consistency.

But “Happy Valley” is different. Sally Wainwright knows about crime and its effects, but she also knows about people. Like everybody else, she has a flawed cop as a central character, but they don’t just loom around looking significant. They also have warm, genuine colleagues who say “You’re hard work”, and mean it.

Above all, she’s brilliant about families, and what goes on within them. For some reason, TV thinks the greatest compliment it can pay successful writers is to allow them the expensive compliment of a large-scale police raid (see the decline of “Line of Duty”). But what’s rivetting about “Happy Valley” is the tension between the two sisters, and how that intricately affects all the people around them. Even if there wasn’t a crime in sight, this would be brilliant.