The Moorside

I've only seen the first episode but I can be confident that my rating isn't going to change and neither will my opinion of this program.

Firstly, don't watch it if you think you're going to find out anything you didn't already know from TV and newspaper reports. Don't watch it if you want to see sweeping camera shots of Dewsbury and the surrounding countryside. It wasn't filmed there.

You'll watch this because it was written by Neil Mckay who has written some great TV in the past. He's written TV shows about the Moors Murderers and Fred & Rose West. You have to remember that when shows like this are written there will be some added drama that didn't actually happen so as to sex up the show.

The problem with this show is that it's impossible to sex up so there's lots of dialogue showing the "can-do" attitude of the residents of The Moorside estate. Whether much of it actually happened is questionable, however, the actresses did spend time with their real-life counterparts so there will be some true to life scenes and dialogue.

For me, it was exactly what I expected from a show on this subject.

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 true story behind this two-part drama is not really known in the U.S. so the reviews from the U.K. with spoilers or references to the real story won't mean much to those of us from elsewhere. I found it a very interesting story about rough living and choices for those in difficult situations with seeminly limited options. The directing, editing, and score bring to life a neighborhood and neighbors in the best and worst of circumstances, and the acting by all the female leads is absolutely tremendous.

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.

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