For Fans of Happy Valley

British television has produced extraordinary performances by women in leading roles, and Lancashire's Catherine Cawood belongs at the top of that list. She is funny, angry, bone-tired, and entirely without self-pity, often in the same scene. The writing gives her room, but Lancashire fills it with a physicality and specificity that makes every moment feel like real life overheard rather than drama staged. Series three in particular is a sustained masterclass in how to carry the weight of a decade of story without it looking like effort.

The most striking thing about Wainwright's scripts is not the crime plots but the dialogue between women. Catherine and her sister Clare talk the way siblings actually talk: with history, with shorthand, with affection that sometimes sounds like irritation. It is rare enough in drama to be notable. Wainwright has been doing this consistently across Scott and Bailey, Last Tango in Halifax, and Gentleman Jack. If you have not explored her wider work, that is where to go next.

The Calder Valley setting is not decorative. The geography of Happy Valley shapes everything: who can afford to live where, who commutes, who is stuck. The show understands that place is class and class is crime, and it never has to say any of that out loud. British procedurals that use their locations as more than backdrop (Vera in Northumberland, Hinterland in mid-Wales) share this quality, but Happy Valley uses it with the most precision.