'Happy Valley' Season 3 Kicks Off With An Assured Premiere

By now, we’re all familiar with how Happy Valley likes to kick things off. An oddball, unusual crime (involving addicts, delinquents, and often an animal or appliance) unfolds somewhere across Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, and our beleaguered, no-nonsense, and quick-witted Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) must deescalate it, accompanied by the breakneck editing and camerawork we associate with intense Hollywood cop thrillers. It’s Hot Fuzz, with a bit more grit and less overt parody; to Catherine, every day really does feel as busy as a Hollywood movie. But unlike the invincible maverick cops of America, busting crime makes her absolutely exhausted.

The show’s third and final season starts things off on similar footing (“phantom fridge thrower”, you will always be famous), but Catherine isn’t present – instead, she’s surrounded by fog in the backroads of the Yorkshire moors. It feels like a deliberate choice: is Catherine doomed to wander a hazy northern landscape, struggling to find clarity or closure?

If Season 3 begins on a note of existential dread, it’s short-lived: Catherine is called to a dam where human remains (read: half a goddamn skeleton) has washed up in a barrel. The criminal investigators try to dismiss her forensic assumptions, but she knows exactly who the body belongs to, thanks to its spinal bolts and metal plating on the teeth. Apparently, it’s Gary Gogowski, a low-level criminal who was presumed dead seven years previous, going missing right before Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) was locked up again at the end of Season 1.