Sherwood series 2 review: BBC crime drama struggles to recapture the freshness of its first season

Monica Dolan and David Harewood are stellar additions but series two of James Graham’s hit series is let down by attempts to shoehorn contemporary politics

When “bad” King John, retreating during the First Barons’ War, reached The Wash, a tidal estuary in the Midlands, he was in disarray. The Crown Jewels were lost to the water during his crossing, and shortly after he died at Newark Castle in Nottinghamshire. John’s wickedness may have been punished by Nottingham’s topography, but his image was crystallised by local mythology. This is a land that repudiates authority, that challenges the rich and is laden with lost treasures – all themes that recur in the second series of James Graham’s Sherwood, which returns to BBC One.

In Ashfield and beyond, rumours are swirling about plans to reopen a pit in the Nottinghamshire coal belt, causing the new Sheriff, Lisa (Ria Zmitrowicz), to go head-to-head with a slimy tycoon, Franklin Warner (Robert Lindsay). But while this may be the big picture for the local area, more pressing concerns are arising between local crime families when drug-fuelled hothead Ryan (Oliver Huntingdon) summarily executes the son of a rival dynasty, precipitating an all-out turf war. Quick trigger fingers pull in a host of returning characters – including David Morrissey’s detective, St Clair; Lesley Manville’s grieving widow Julie; and Lorraine Ashbourne’s meddling matriarch Daphne – and plenty new ones, played by a stellar cast of British TV talent: David Harewood, Monica Dolan, Sharlene Whyte and Stephen Dillane.

The first series of Sherwood saw a community dealing with generational trauma. Old wounds from the closure of the mines resurfaced, alongside a very modern tale of disenfranchisement. Despite a premise that wasn’t afraid to stray into cliche – a crime spree perpetrated by an archer, through the woodland of Nottinghamshire, is hardly a novel idea – it felt urgent, something that’s all too rare in primetime crime drama. This second chapter of Sherwood, though, struggles to recapture that freshness. “After years of deindustrialisation. Everywhere else is getting jobs in tech or science. Can we not invest in that instead?” the Sheriff argues, over the prospect of a reopened mine. But the link between not buying new computers for local schools and gunshot executions on the Nottingham coast never feels fully explored.

There’s no doubt that Sherwood aspires to be more cerebral than Line of Duty, a show whose spectre looms over all BBC primetime thrillers. Writer James Graham cut his teeth on political drama, and this show reflects that. Yet this second series is strongest when it focuses on the human implications of street-level violence. Attempts to shoehorn contemporary politics – a critique of the doomed “levelling up” agenda – ring hollow. Lisa, a “very modern” queer, female Sheriff of Nottingham, which will undoubtedly bait certain viewers, is handed some really clunking dialogue. “It feels like a gimmick,” she tells Lindsay’s cartoonish, goatee-twirling baron. “Tossing some red meat to the red wall.” Perhaps when this second series was conceived, commissioners didn’t anticipate that the Tories would already be in electoral Siberia.

Real, boring, chunky issues – like questions over the complexity of decarbonising the grid while maintaining energy security, or the economic challenge of balancing growth against raising taxes – are given short shrift. Instead, the drama is about three families. The flailing Sparrows, still dealing with the fallout from the first series; the Bransons, led by a fearsome Dolan and Dillane; and the Warners, the landed class who may have been involved in Thatcherite shenanigans. And though the season starts as an unsteady retread of ground covered in the first series, soon enough the muzzles start flaring and the blood starts flowing. If it aspired to be a “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” version of Line of Duty, it ends up as something more like Top Boy for Guardian readers.

Which is no bad thing. The ripples from a single crime – spreading out in concentric circles, growing ever larger – make for an exhilarating backdrop. Even if the politics are simplified, the inter-clan politicking is anything but. “Come to Nottinghamshire,” Lindsay snarls, “where the outlaws are back and thriving!” It’s that sense of an outlaw country that Graham renders beautifully, in bloody, brutal tones.

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