The 50 best TV shows of 2019: No 5 – The Virtues

It has been said that Stephen Graham is Shane Meadows’ muse. Graham’s qualities as an actor – unflinching emotional honesty, the ability to convey an infinity of turmoil in a single facial expression – coincide perfectly with Meadows’ journeys into despair and redemption. The Virtues is a career peak for both. A drama that began as a desperate trawl through the anguish of Graham’s Joseph – a lonely alcoholic, spun further off the rails by the departure of his son to Australia with his mother and stepfather – evolved into a moving depiction of everyday heroism.

The Virtues is a tale of abuse and survival – and Meadows’ extraordinary Observer interview before the series aired showed exactly how personal this was. Meadows revealed that as a nine-year-old he was sexually abused by a teenager in woods near his aunt’s home. He subsequently repressed this horror and has only started to come to terms with it recently, via eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), a treatment that is often used for PTSD. This is a story of the surfacing of buried trauma, for both Joseph (who was abused in a children’s home) and Meadows.

When Joseph escapes from Liverpool and heads to Ireland, he’s returning to the scene of the crime. It’s where he was abused but it’s also the home of his sister, Anna (the superb Helen Behan), from whom he was separated as a child. Joseph is welcomed into her family home but his scars are palpable. His mercurial presence awakens hidden conflict in his hosts, not least in Anna’s sister-in-law, Dinah (Niamh Algar), whose blithe exterior barely masks the pain she carries over the loss of her son, taken from her by social services. In the hands of less honest writers than Meadows and co-writer Jack Thorne, Dinah and Joseph might well redeem each other. But the truth, inevitably, is less comforting. Even with the best of intentions, they are too traumatised by the past and bewildered by the present to do much more than trigger each other’s neuroses. Eventually both face reckonings with starkly different outcomes.

All this should be impossibly bleak, making The Virtues a drama to be endured rather than enjoyed. It is remarkable, then, that for all its overpowering intensity, there is plenty of love and humanity to hang on to. There’s a scene in which an exhausted Joseph finally wakes in Helen’s daughter’s bed to find his long-lost sister by his side. The conversation that ensues is startling: monosyllabic, faltering, inarticulate and yet somehow, overflowing with more raw love and even rawer pain than anything else on TV this year. Above all else, it feels real. Meadows’ working methods (improvisation, the casting of actors on the basis of emotional literacy rather than technical chops) bear extraordinary fruit in scenes such as this. And these moments are scattered throughout the four episodes – dots of light at the end of the various dark tunnels the characters are forced to navigate. If The Virtues is frequently hard to watch, these fragments of hope make it impossible to switch off.

The Virtues is analogous to 2018’s standout drama, Patrick Melrose. But Joseph is a working-class Melrose, not cushioned by money or connections; a Melrose of kebab shops and park-bench cider binges. His heroism is all the more palpable for it. So much drama is binary, trading on heroes and villains. Both The Virtues and Patrick Melrose show how much drama is to be found in flawed people trying to do the right thing. The Virtues boasted a greater sense of genuine jeopardy than any other show this year – and the eventual catharsis it offered felt all the more well deserved for it. Revenge has featured strongly in Meadows’ work but The Virtues wrong-foots that instinct and confronts something more complex. Here, revenge is impossible. Joseph’s abuser is already close to death so there’s nowhere to go with the impulse, no meaningful action that would have any effect. So what does that leave? It leaves living a good life as the best revenge imaginable.