The Season-to-Season Pivot: Happy Valley, The Fall and Bloodline

The BBC and Netflix’s acclaimed Happy Valley is an open mystery which also has an interesting pivot at the end of Season 1. The pilot reveals that about eight years ago, the daughter of policewoman Catherine Cawood (the brilliant Sarah

Lancashire) committed suicide after being raped by felon Tommy Lee Royce and giving birth to a child. When Catherine, who has been raising the boy ever since, finds out that Royce has been released from prison, the murderous rage she’s been repressing all these years begins to boil over. Royce becomes obsessed with the boy and eventually abducts him; Catherine saves her grandson from

Royce and captures him. He’s going to go to prison, but he’s not dead yet.

It’s interesting to note that most British police officers do not carry guns. So in shows such as Broadchurch and Happy Valley, the cops sometimes beat criminals with billy clubs or their bare hands, but there’s no shooting. It makes the detectives in Chris Chibnall’s Broadchurch and Sally Wainwright’s Happy

Valley much more vulnerable than their American counterparts.1

!1 The Fall (created by Allan Cubitt and discussed in my book TV Outside the Box:

Trailblazing in the Digital Television Revolution) is an open mystery. We know that Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) is the serial killer being pursued by Detective

Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson). Spector lives a double life: By day he’s a bereavement counselor and a devoted father of two. By night he preys on young brunette women, brutally kills them, arranges their bodies artfully and photographs them. The pivot at the end of the first two seasons hinges on how he continues to evade Gibson, even after she knows who he is.

How many more women will he kill before he’s convicted?

At the end of Season 1, Gibson already knows that Spector is the killer, but doesn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. He decides to leave town with his family, heads to Scotland and brazenly calls Gibson to tell her so. In Season 2,

Spector returns to Belfast and tempts fate by resuming an affair with the family babysitter. Gibson eventually manages to arrest and interrogate him, where he confesses to all the murders but one—Rose Stagg, a former girlfriend. The cops take Spector in handcuffs to a woodland location, where he directs Gibson— alone—to a car where Rose is locked in the trunk, barely alive. Meanwhile, another thug who blames Spector for seducing his bereaved wife has followed the convoy and shoots Spector. Season 2 ends with Spector bleeding out in

!2 Gibson’s arms, but Season 3 pivots with the reveal that he has survived. Heroic

ER doctors save his life, allowing him to recover—with a severe, but convenient, case of amnesia. For Gibson, the criminal case is far from closed. She’s still determined to bring Spector to justice. But in his weakened condition, he seems so vulnerable and innocent that it’s almost as if he’s a different person. Is he repentant and redeemable, or is he “faking it” and still a psychopath—waiting for the right moment to kill again?

Bloodline, another Netflix Original series, was created by Todd Kessler, Glenn

Kessler and Daniel Zelman, who also created the highly successful for

FX. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer has said of the slow-burn show,

“The first season of Bloodline is the pilot. It’s not like the first episode of

Bloodline is the pilot.”2 Although I devoted a section to Bloodline in my book

TV Outside the Box, Season 2 had not come out yet at the time. After the

Season 1 finale reveals that John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) did indeed kill his older brother Danny (Ben Mendelssohn), a pivot keeps the show going that is worth deeper analysis here.

In Bloodline’s first episode, we see John carrying Danny (is he dead, or just passed out?) through the swamp in a driving rainstorm. Both of them are

!3 wearing seersucker suits. He dumps Danny onto a boat near the shore, douses him with gasoline, lights a match and drops it. As the fire explodes, John jumps off to safety. The writers spend the rest of Season 1 working up to the “why” that caused John to do this. In the finale, John strangles Danny in the surf—not in self-defense, but out of rage at Danny's cavalier, “me-first” attitude and refusal to appreciate how much John has done for him. John calls sister Meg

(Linda Cardellini) and brother Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) and tells them to get down there, now. When they do, they become his accomplices. They hide

Danny's body in the trunk of Meg's car; later John sets fire to it in the scene we saw in Episode 1.

Season 2 thus becomes about what will happen to John. How will the “good” son—the one who’s always done everything right—deal with being a murderer?

Will he choose the high road of confessing to his crime, or the low road of trying to cover it up? Not only does John choose to keep his crime a secret from his wife and family, he chooses to run for county sheriff. John gradually goes from

“good guy” to “good guy who did a bad thing” to a full-fledged criminal who must run from the law. His deputy, Marco Diaz (Enrique Murciano) begins to suspect that John may be the guilty party. Now John's ability to play innocent will be challenged, since he works with Marco every day; Marco is engaged to

!4 Meg and will soon be John's brother-in-law. Meanwhile he and Marco are investigating drug runner Wayne Lowry (Glenn Morshower), who is responsible for the deaths of a number of undocumented immigrants. John wants to frame him for Danny’s murder, but Lowry surprises John with a damning tape that

Danny recorded before he died. John has no choice but to submit to Lowry's demands.

In its final Season 3, Bloodline pivots again to courtroom drama, as we see the fallout of the crimes play out. The show has now been canceled—some critics felt it never fully recovers from the loss of Danny’s character, though he does continue to appear to John as a ghost. The Season-to-Season Pivot remains, however, a smart way to keep the season-long procedural fresh, inventive and surprising.

Notes

1 Jon Kelly, “Why British Police Don't Have Guns,” BBC.com, September 19, 2012. http:// www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19641398.

2 Todd Van der Werff, “Netflix Is Accidentally Inventing a New Art Form—Not Quite TV and Not Quite Film,” Vox.com, July 30, 2015. https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9061833/netflix-binge- new-artform.

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