Column: One of TV’s most acclaimed shows took seven years off. It was planned all along

Even considering the interruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the often random timing of British television, seven years seems a long time to wait between seasons of a series.

But for U.S. fans of “Happy Valley,” which returns May 22 on AMC+, BBC America and Acorn TV, it is, as they would say in the north of England, nowt.

The third and final season of Sally Wainwright’s gloriously human and narratively thrilling West Yorkshire drama, which stars the incomparable Sarah Lancashire, was met with wild enthusiasm in the U.K. when it premiered there in January. Having watched Season 3 in its entirety (twice), I can tell you, without fear of spoilers, that it is more than worth the wait.

And that is due in large part to the big gap between the second and third seasons, which was quite intentional and emotionally vital.

“I was waiting for Ryan to grow up,” Wainwright says simply.

Ryan (Rhys Connah) is the grandson of Catherine Cawood (Lancashire), the force of nature around whom “Happy Valley” revolves. A Yorkshire police sergeant, Catherine is by turns steely eyed and kindhearted as she investigates terrible crimes, sorts out local and familial disputes and attempts to move through her grief and trauma.

The first season opens with her still reeling from the death of her teenage daughter, Becky, years earlier. Raped by local thug Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), Becky gave birth to Ryan and six weeks later died by suicide. Catherine’s decision to raise her grandson divided the family even further; her husband Richard (Derek Riddell) left, as did her son Daniel (Karl Davies). Only her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran), a recovering heroin addict, remained to help raise the boy.

By Season 2, the family had begun to repair itself, but “our Ryan,” an active and often defiant boy, was the linchpin and sticking point of the story — Royce’s increasingly psychotic attempts to have a relationship with his son drives the main narrative while a drumbeat of anxiety syncopates Catherine’s own feelings: Will Ryan turn out to be like his father?

That’s why Wainwright, who has created and written innumerable fine shows including most recently “Last Tango in Halifax” and “Gentleman Jack,” decided to put a substantial gap between Season 2 and the finale — to offer viewers real closure.

Originally, that gap was imagined as a bit smaller, but, as Wainwright explains, other projects, including “Gentleman Jack,” and the packed schedules of Lancashire (“Julia,” “Last Tango in Halifax”) and Norton (“Grantchester,” “Little Women”) added a few years.

“I wanted Ryan to be about 14 or 15, credibly old enough to have agency, to make his own choice about things, to be able to travel about by himself without it being unusual,” Wainwright says in a video interview. Instead, Ryan is 16 as the third season opens. “As it panned out, the gap is the ideal amount of time; if he had been any younger, I don’t think I could have told the story I wanted to tell.”

Many child stars enter young adulthood on long-running series, but having one season end when a character is around 9 and and the next begin when he is 16 is startling and deeply effective.

Rhys Connah as Ryan in the first season of “Happy Valley,” left, and seven years later in the third season of the BBC series.

(Ben Blackall, Matt Squire / BBC Studios)

The decision to keep Connah in the role gives the show’s internal passage of time astonishing verisimilitude, as well as an emotional wallop, but it was not without its perils. There were, Wainwright says, early conversations about whether it would be better to recast.

“Child actors don’t always grow into adult actors,” she says. “And we had to find out if Rhys wanted to do it, which he did. We worked with him to make sure was still comfortable onscreen, because he’s been at school and not acting much.”

“But,” she adds, “I was quite keen for us to get him there, because I felt if we recast the part it would not have the same emotional impact. And I think he’s absolutely wonderful; he’s got such a subtle delivery, a vulnerability that is quite rare in an actor that age.”

For Connah, returning to the role was both thrilling and nerve-wracking.

“In between Season 2 and 3,” he says via Zoom. “I got some calls asking, ‘Would you be interested in doing it again? It might be in a few years, after you’ve grown up a bit.’”

His answer was always yes, and before the series began shooting, he spoke with Wainwright and other cast members about how their relationships had developed over the years. “But I was very nervous,” he says in a broad Northern accent, “because if I came on set and I couldn’t act, it’d be like ‘Sorry guys, you’ve waited however many years but you’re gonna have to recast us.’”

Fortunately, he says, the rest of the cast was very supportive. Particularly Con O’Neill, who plays Neil, Clare’s boyfriend — although the two had almost no scenes together in the second season, by the third they have a close relationship. “So we had to figure out how that happened,” Connah says.

Sally Wainwright, the creator of “Happy Valley,” in 2019.

(BBC)

“Happy Valley” was Connah’s first experience as an actor — as a child, he was plucked for an audition from an acting class in Bury, a town near Manchester. “I knew I was auditioning but I didn’t know exactly what it was for.”

In the first season, he particularly loved working with Norton, despite a violent climactic scene involving the two.

“The location [of that scene] was on the river, so any time we weren’t filming, we were off skipping stones,” he says. “ James was really great about going into and out of character; he was menacing in the role, but he wasn’t walking around being all big and scary. After [a difficult scene] he’d ask, ‘Are you OK?’ and we’d go back to chucking paper airplanes about.”

To prepare for Season 3, Connah watched the first two seasons for the first time. Because he was so young when the series began, he says, “I had only watched my own bits. A lot of the other plotlines I didn’t know because I was 9, and it didn’t affect my performance so why would they tell me all this horrific stuff going on?”

Indeed, much of Season 3’s main plot revolves around what Ryan knows, and does not know, about his mother’s death and his father’s crimes. “Going in, I thought about the difference between what Ryan knows and what he believes,” Connah says. “Ryan knows what Tommy has done, but he doesn’t want to fully accept it because Tommy is his dad. He has to do some mental gymnastics.”

Beyond the specific plot points, Connah says, is a larger theme of adults trying to shield children from things the children already understand. “They’re worried about all this stuff that Ryan’s already gone through on his own, as happens with a lot of teenagers — they go through stuff on their own.”

As a young adult, Connah has recently experienced fame in a way he did not as a child — “It’s absolutely mental; I’m walking through college and see my face on a billboard” — in part because the “Happy Valley” finale was a huge hit in the U.K.

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It was very gratifying for Wainwright, who emphasizes that “Happy Valley” is not a cop show but “a show in which this woman happens to be a cop.” She had been concerned that seven years was a bit much: “If you disappear for long enough, people forget who you were.”

“When you write a first series, it’s always an experiment, but when we did the second, me and Sarah talked about just doing three, having a really definite conclusion, a sense that we would tell three really cracking stories and know when to stop. I think Sarah’s really good at knowing when to stop.”

Playing Catherine, Wainwright adds, was hard on Lancashire, because she becomes so personally invested in her characters, and Catherine’s journey was such a difficult one, emotionally and physically.

“We didn’t want to just go on to make more money. We told that character’s stories. Why go on when there’s so many other stories to tell?”