Wainwright, Sally A (1963- )

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    ‘Renegade Nell’ Review: When the Highwayman Is a Superwoman

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    In a new series for Disney+, the creator of “Happy Valley” and “Last Tango in Halifax” imagines a sometimes-superpowered 18th-century justice warrior.The British television writer Sally Wainwright may not be a household name in the United States, but for more than a decade she has been turning out television shows whose variety and consistently high quality few writer-producers can match.“Scott & Bailey,” which premiered in 2011, was a smart, tart buddy-detective procedural. The blended-families drama “Last Tango in Halifax” (2012) was finely tooled, irresistible hokum, reflecting the lessons Wainwright learned during her tenure on the venerable soap opera “Coronation Street.” She raised her game with “Happy Valley” (2014), a terrific series about the intertwined work and home lives of a doggedly heroic policewoman. And she segued into costume drama with “Gentleman Jack” (2019), a fact-based Victorian saga of lesbian romance and financial maneuvering that was, like the others, well made, well acted and highly engaging.The shows have a couple of through lines. They all take place in or near Wainwright’s home ground of Yorkshire, in northern England. And they all focus on tough, take-charge women — often women whose commitment to what they know or think is right can make them a little hard to live with.Wainwright’s latest show, “Renegade Nell,” whose eight episodes premiered Friday on Disney+, takes her down some new paths. The action moves south, toward London (it was filmed in Oxfordshire), and further back in time, to the early 1700s. And in a significant departure, Wainwright dabbles in the supernatural: Her heroine, the commoner Nell Jackson, can summon otherworldly strength and agility to battle the black magic wielded by her higher-born foes.Nell, played by Louisa Harland of “Derry Girls,” is another Wainwright heroine who must learn how to harness her strength and high spirits, and not do collateral damage to her family and friends. (She gets called “unnatural,” an epithet also applied to the protagonist of “Gentleman Jack” when she acts in ways women are not supposed to.) Nell’s challenge is greater, though, because the strength is so unexpected. Stumbling upon a stagecoach robbery, she is about to be shot when a tiny light appears and gives her ruffian-bashing, bullet-dodging capabilities.The light turns out to be a winged humanoid named Billy, played by Nick Mohammed of “Ted Lasso,” who returns to bail out Nell whenever she is in danger (though not always as promptly as she would like). And she is in danger a lot: Her new powers, combined with some complicated and tragic circumstances, turn her into a fugitive suspected of multiple murders and eventually put her in the unlikely position of saving the British crown from a Jacobite invasion. (Thematically, it’s helpful for Wainwright that the actual monarch at the time, who faced an actual coup attempt, was a woman, Queen Anne, played in the show with an arch sang-froid by Jodhi May.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Happy Valley’ Review: The End of the Hero’s Journey

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      Sarah Lancashire returns in the long-delayed final season of one of the best, and most human, crime dramas on TV.Each season of the great British series “Happy Valley” begins the same way, with the rock-solid cop Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) facing the everyday bizarrerie of policing in a tired, depressed, grimly beautiful pocket of West Yorkshire: teenage sheep rustlers, a jilted boyfriend threatening to set himself on fire, unseen agitators heaving kitchen appliances out of upper-story windows onto patrol cars. Compassionate but impatient and prone to anger, smarter than the detectives who condescend to her, Cawood wears her black uniform and neon vest like a bulky suit of armor. She’s a contemporary knight errant, upholding a code of decency against the terrors of modern life.“Happy Valley,” whose final season premieres on Monday (streaming on Acorn TV and AMC+, broadcast on BBC America), is a pocket-size, prosaic saga — a hero’s tale contained in three six-episode seasons and embedded in a family drama. The emotions that buffet the characters are epic in scale, but the action, though it has occasional flashes of brutal violence, tends to be of the everyday, walking-and-talking variety. Like all mythical heroes, Cawood has an antagonist, the psychopathic rapist and killer Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), who is the father of her grandson. But for long stretches of the show, he is in prison, and he and Cawood spend much more time stewing about each other than actually facing off.The second season was shown in 2016, and that seven-year gap is reflected onscreen. Season 3 begins with Cawood counting the days to her retirement and enjoying atypically peaceful relations with her sister, the recovering alcoholic Clare (Siobhan Finneran), and with her now teenage grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah). The center quickly fails to hold, however, as both the emergence of a body in a drained reservoir and Cawood’s discovery of a profound betrayal by someone close to her raise the specter of Royce, even though he is in prison for life.In its structure, “Happy Valley” is very much a traditional British crime series, with seemingly unconnected plot strands and investigations that wind themselves together against a backdrop of cop-shop politics. But in the hands of the accomplished writer and producer Sally Wainwright (“Gentleman Jack,” “Scott & Bailey), who has written every episode, it is also a powerful social drama that focuses unflinchingly on male violence against women without sliding into speechmaking or heavy-handed symbolism. In the new season’s major subplot, a less-than-sympathetic female character is caught between two seemingly more capable men whose weaknesses run deeper than hers.Overall, the final season is, as any faithful viewer could guess, the culmination of Cawood’s extended battle to the (at least figurative) death with Royce. In order to set up a satisfyingly visceral conclusion, Wainwright forces the action and pushes at plausibility a little harder than those viewers will be used to. The story’s focus also is diluted by her indulgence of characters from the first two seasons who are brought back but not given much to do.Those offenses are minor, though. And the mechanics of the plot fade in the face of the prodigious performances by Lancashire and Norton, both of whom calmly straddle the allegorical and the mundane: the stoic warrior who is a grouchy grandmother, the indestructible horror-movie monster who is a sad victim of his own sociopathy. Also wonderful to watch are Finneran — the relationship between Cawood, for whom weakness is anathema, and the softhearted Clare has been the show’s backbone — and Connah; a child of 10 when the previous season was filmed, he is excellent as the now nearly adult Ryan.Cawood’s mission in the final season has a new, even more personal dimension: She must protect Ryan from his father while also, grudgingly and tardily, acknowledging Ryan’s right to learn about the man for himself. In a time when television and film are playing catch-up with female superheros and action figures, “Happy Valley” has quietly provided a paradigm of local, human heroism. More