The Moorside

It's very well made and the performances are uniformly good but you can't escape the fact that it's a dramatisation of events showing how people coped in the orbit of an evil, vile and contemptuous imbecile who happened to be able to give birth repeatedly. People wanted to believe the best of Karen Matthews, a disgusting and manipulative person who did something absolutely appalling and, for a short period of time, got people feeling sympathy for her because thinking otherwise would have made them feel dirty. This is not a bad show but it could have been better. Good TV shows have characters people can empathise with and Kare Matthews is a truly vile person.

The standout performance here is Gemma Whelan's -- very real, memorably so, and, if you'll forgive the cliché, brave. (Reminded me of Lorraine Stanley, similarly brilliant in "London to Brighton.") I'm always impressed when an actress who, on the evidence of photos, normally looks clever and pretty can play a character as fat, dumb, weak, and unattractive as Shannon Matthews (and can make her genuinely interesting).

Among the remarkably unappealing folk of Moorside (coarse, creepy, loutish-looking men, pulpy obese women, all speaking in almost unintelligible Yorkshire accents), the neighbor played by Siân Brooke, relatively slim, soft-spoken, and beautiful, stuck out like another species. I admit to finding her the most sympathetic character in the drama.

However, the story's heroine is clearly supposed to be Julie Bushby, the self-appointed community leader, played by Sheridan Smith. She struck me as somewhat obnoxious and self-important in the first episode, and I was pleased to see her taken down a peg, if only briefly, in the second.

The way she rallied the neighborhood on behalf of the missing girl seemed useless and rather ridiculous -- parades, candlelight vigils, singalongs, etc. -- but maybe the Moorsiders actually went in for such virtue-signaling stunts. At one point episode 2 actually has them singing Kumbaya.

This drama was marred, for me, by a few scenes of horribly contrived preachiness and exposition, especially one in which Brooke and Smith discuss pedophilia. The dialogue seemed totally fake. (It was also marred, in places, by sloppy editing, such as a scene between four women in a car that focuses so disproportionately on three of them that you wonder if the fourth, played by the ubiquitous Siobhan Finneran, is even in the car with them.)

The biggest surprise, for me, was how pleasant, or at least not shabby and ugly, the Moorside council estate is. While the individual houses are crowded together, as in any development, they look, at least on the outside, fairly attractive -- quite a contrast to the multilevel council flats one sees in many movies.

I won't go into any details because you should watch it and make up your mind.

The acting is brilliant, you would hardly believe that Gemma Whelan was the same person that played Yara Greyjoy in "Game of Thrones".

The story was basically play by numbers, you didn't really learn anything new if you saw this on the news.

I do think this could have been a three parter. We didn't really see the aftermath other than a few shouty bits at the end. I really wanted to see the impact it had on the town at the end, but it seemed to end rather suddenly.

It would have been nice to see what happened when she came out of prison, but we saw nothing of this.

I will repeat however that the acting was top notch, but I was left a little disappointed with the story.

It's interesting. Different. More a character study than a crime thriller. What price friendship? Very good performances. Realistic family and community situations. Recommended.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

A dramatisation of the real life tale of Shannon Matthews, a nine year old girl from the Dewsbury area of Yorkshire, who went missing for a short while in early 2008, and sparked a nationwide appeal for her safe return (but received substantially less coverage than Madeleine McCann, from a more affluent background...but who's never been found.) Julie Bushby (Sheridan Smith), a close friend of Shannon's wayward mother Karen (Gemma Whelan), spearheaded the local community into action, and all the local residents turned out to look for Shannon in a unified show of solidarity, while Karen's behaviour was just disinterested and odd. Eventually, in what appeared to be a rare happy ending for this type of case, Shannon was found...but the truth, in it's own way, was as earth shattering as if she hadn't, when it was discovered Shannon had been abducted by her own mother and her friend Michael Donavan (Sam Chapman), while her current partner Craig Meehan (Tom Hansen) was arrested for possessing child pornography.

There are many who subscribe to the mediums of film and television, strictly as a means of escapism, to retreat into a world of fantasy, with limitless possibilities and an almost certainly predetermined happy ending. There is not much interest, from these people, in seeing re-enactments of tales constrained by the boundaries of real life, even happy tales, played out with all the grubby, unavoidable trappings of reality. A tale set somewhere like Dewsbury Moor, a place that perfectly encapsulates the gritty, unglamorous surroundings/way of life that are probably the norm for a no doubt many unidentified number among us. In bringing this dramatisation to the screen. director Paul Whittington has shoved this bleak landscape straight in our face and left us to witness the car crash that proceeded.

In what appears to be the most meagre common ground with a fantasy film as opposed to the hard, brutal depiction of reality that it is, the lead character is the good guy, or certainly the person with the most noble intentions, even at the expense of not really being the main antagonist of the story. In this role, as the bright, bubbly spark of flickering decency in a sea of relentlessly, depressingly immoral, grubby people, Sheridan Smith truly exemplifies what a terrific actress she is, demonstrating her ability to transform and really immerse herself into any role she's doing, and really bringing the character of Julie Bushby to life like no other. The supporting performers are also strikingly accurate, but it is truly her who steals the show.

The dichotomy of Matthews is simply as a figure who took dysfunctional to a whole new level, who skipped her appearance on The Jeremy Kyle Show and gained public notoriety in a different, far more shocking way. The Daily Mail/Tory Party would probably have you believe she's symptomatic of hundreds of others across the country, and while that's most likely very debatable, this is still a well made and hauntingly accurate portrayal, spread out over two series, of a case that'll probably never be forgotten. *****