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Sherwood is the best crime show of the last five years, hands down.
I won’t summarize the plot or characters, both of which are intricately written and surprising. Like The Wire, it’s less about any one person or story thread and more about how they interweave. It’s a show that would please a Marxist history professor and someone who ran out of episodes of Vera.
Sherwood takes place in Nottingham, the site of Robin Hood, now an economically depressed community that hasn’t bounced back from the mines closing. During the strikes of the 1980s, half the town walked the picket lines. The other half scabbed. Neither side has forgotten or forgiven the other.
The killer uses a bow and arrow and hides out in the forest, creating a media shitstorm. Yet the crime itself is anchored in these long-simmering feuds and secrets from the Thatcher years, the wounds that haven’t healed and the secrets no one talks about. The romantic, lost past of Merry England, and the cold reality of post-industrial cities.
David Morrissey gives the performance of his life as a cop desperate to do good in a system that won’t let him. Lesley Manville is reliably brilliant as a bereaved grandmother. And Lorraine Ashbourne plays the matriarch of a crime family, as good as Margo Martindale in Justified or Jackie Weaver in Animal Kingdom. (A crime matriarch is a hard role to pull off.)
The second season came out in North America on Britbox this Christmas. I didn’t think it could live up to the first, but it does, focusing on efforts of economic renewal and gentrification, generational ties among criminal families, as well as the evolution of law enforcement, all of this affecting a younger generation that will either be caught up in the bullshit of their parents or find a new way forward.
Written by James Graham, there’s an engagement with reality and history to Sherwood that no other show has, crime drama or otherwise. But it’s also a terrific mystery.