Season 41 - South Riding (2011)
I know there are those out there who love this adaptation of the book by Winifred Holtby, but I am not one of them. I even gave it a second chance but I just can't with it. If anything I hate it even more. Given the cast and the crew you'd think this would be right up my alley, but the cat hanging out in the alley trying to upstage Anna Maxwell Martin and Douglas Henshall is the only part of this miniseries that I actually like. If you've watched the 1978 adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie you are in the wheelhouse of what I was hoping for with this series. A look at women overcoming the roles they were forced into because of their sex and raising each other up and tearing each other down within the setting of a local community and its school. And there are glimpses of that. But instead there's a prevalent dirty old man vibe that I can't get beyond. The creepy sexualization of children in a school presentation, the lecherous board member, and then the problem of David Morrissey's Robert Carne are too much for me. All the dramatic music in the world won't trick me into liking a series which holds up a rapist as the romantic ideal. But surely, that's not what this series is doing you say? Oh yes. It is. So Robert Carne has a wife Muriel. She is institutionalized and he has bankrupted himself to make sure she gets the best care despite the fact she would rather just be at home. But she wouldn't have had to be institutionalized if not for him. She had been told she is under no circumstance to have a child. Robert knows this. They practice safe sex with a diaphragm. He comes back from the war and finds her flirting with other men in her bedroom, he snaps and proceeds to rape her. Muriel gets pregnant with a child, their delicate daughter Midge, and she loses her mind. From the show you can assume it's unspecified hysteria that probably arises out of postpartum psychosis, though it's never spelled out. But what is spelled out is that this is all the result of having a child. Therefore it is Robert's fault. Supposedly the weight of caring for this woman he has never stopped loving is what has damaged his heart and he will one day succumb to an angina attack. Which, if I'm honest, he deserves. He deserves death and pain and more. If he loved this woman so much why did he destroy her? And he KNEW it would destroy her. Enter radical schoolteacher Sarah Burton played by Anna Maxwell Martin. She is the antithesis of everything Robert Carne stands for and yet she falls for him. She falls for him hard. And I am flummoxed as to why. They have one or two dances at a hotel over the holidays and are ready to jump into bed together, all while he's hallucinating his wife, and that was all it took to steal her heart. Does she have like a Heathcliff complex? That she falls for the worst in humanity? I really would like to know more about her fiance that died during the war. Was he also a deplorable? Because make no mistake, if this were contemporary and set in America Carne would be MAGA. And yet, as Sarah is declaiming her love for him, she says she hates everything he believes in and stands for. Um, girl, what someone believes in and stands for are what they are, so how do you love him exactly!?! As I said previously, I just can't with this. South Riding can go ride off into the sunset. Or better yet, die in a cliff collapse.
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