No man is an island — however on the Isle of Man, a lady, Mary, manages to construct a secret second life from which she excludes her household. It’s solely when she dies, all of a sudden and inexplicably, on a seaside on the Irish sea that her grownup daughters uncover she has spent her ultimate years placing down roots far-off from them.
Maryland, a brand new three-part ITV drama, considers how little we learn about these closest to us and the way a lot we wrongly assume. It follows two middle-aged sisters — frosty careerist Rosaline (Eve Finest) and delicate, conscientious Becca (Suranne Jones, billed as co-creator) — as they arrive to phrases with their loss and the blindsiding realisation that they by no means possessed an actual sense of who their mom was. As they steadily piece collectively how and why the latter lived and died, the siblings additionally start to change painful truths of their very own fractured relationship. Over just a few days of frank interplay, they be taught extra about each other than they’ve in years of unarticulated envy, insecurity and judgment.
The place the characters are confronted with shocks and revelations, the present itself is marked by a somewhat predictable emotional trajectory — from recrimination to remorse to reconciliation. However it’s elevated by these ever-reliable leads. Whereas actors are normally praised for his or her chemistry, right here they need to be recognised for cultivating a convincingly uneasy, oscillating dynamic. Rosaline and Becca crave intimacy however create distance, shifting right away from playful, nostalgic memory to trauma-fuelled preventing.
However witnessing them each unspool in grief and confusion in the end proves extra compelling than seeing them come again collectively. Within the closure-heavy third chapter, charged emotion begins to get replaced by misty-eyed sentimentality — and briefly introduces a thorny moral debate that the present doesn’t really feel finest geared up to deal with.
Clearly Maryland is just not the must-watch present about troubled siblings coping with the loss of life of a mother or father airing this week (that’s Succession). However it’s nonetheless eminently watchable and shifting.
★★★☆☆
Out there to stream on ITVX
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