South Riding (2011)

The series is situated in the British drama sweet spot: between the first and second world wars, when classes started to mix like never before in Britain. Based on Winifred Holtby’s 1936 novel, it tells the story of Sarah Burton, a modern-minded woman who is one of the 2 million British women left without a mate because 2 million British men died in the war. Sarah (Anna Maxwell Martin) has returned from London to her little home town, the fictional South Riding, which sits by the sea in Yorkshire. Here, she persuades the town council — chaired by Mrs. Beddows (“Downton Abbey’s” Penelope Wilton and just as good here) — to hire her as headmistress at the decaying high school for girls. She gets the job after making an emphatic plea for preparing South Riding’s young women for a changing world. One of the more influential men in town, Robert Carne (David Morrissey), isn’t too impressed with her talk and would yank his daughter, Midge, out of the school except that Sarah has somehow gotten through to the nervous girl and brought her out of her shell. He’s a dour sort — hard exterior, soulful center — struggling to keep his estate afloat and provide the best care for his mentally ill wife, who is institutionalized with no hope of recovery (a problem significantly compounded by the fact that his angry actions put her there in a rather direct manner). He falls for Sarah, as does another man, which provides some of the requisite romance for the tale (which does not have an altogether uplifting ending). All the while the town's elders are trying to make a buck on a public housing project that they are ostensibly doing for the greater good. My quarrel with the series is not that it borrows broadly from Dickens--Dickensian England did not end with his death, and so that part is at least accurate--but rather that the emotional aspects of the time are not much explored. Sarah is adamantly single, Robert eschews intimacy, and maybe that is reflective of the place and the time, but a bit more would have made it seem more real. In any case, if you cannot quite satisfy your 'Downton Abby' addiction, this is a good place to turn.