The week in TV: The Pursuit of Love; Fargo; Three Families; The Underground Railroad; Motherland

The Pursuit of Love (BBC One) | iPlayer
Fargo (Channel 4) | All 4
Three Families (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Underground Railroad (Amazon)
Motherland (BBC Two) | iPlayer

Sunday nights do appear to be dear to BBC schedulers: it’s the jewel in the weekly crown, and it’s just a shame that, correspondingly, there has to be a gangrenous thorn in the hoof, which throughout lockdown has been Saturday evenings. But right after THAT Line of Duty, to get the blistering, gleeful watch that is The Pursuit of Love … that’s the sign of a planner pulling out the heavy stops on the organ.

It really is, in the language of Nancy Mitford, most awfully well done. Emily Mortimer’s adaptation manages to tell the bones of the story afresh, with spiffy modern renewals, while remaining immensely tender to the paradox at the heart of Linda, a tween-the-wars rosebud with everything in the world except education or any idea of what she, ever, wants, or stands for: truly writ large the Mitfordian creed of do anything as long as it’s not boring.

Lily James as Linda excels, of course, and will be due awards. She almost made it acceptable – this is not much of a spoiler (it’s bingeable on iPlayer, but I hope many will resist temptation) – to be a kept woman, with just-so dresses and little dogs, and a darling apartment and big shades and money, in Paris, in those dear, dread perfumed days waiting for war. In a way, though, it’s Emily Beecham as cousin Fanny who has to do the lifting: the (relatively) dowdy “nice” friend, who has to make the sensible choices most of us mortals must, has a subtler acting job, to convey, throughout, inner confusion and exasperation, the lot of everywoman, rather than being vouchsafed just sexy exuberance.

Admittedly, it’s nothing but wealth, privilege and snobbery, people in shootingjackets talking about “dagos”, or playing at war. Dominic West, in particular, revels in chewing the set with haught, and with spitty, visceral loathings for foreigners or educated women. One can merely shrug and laugh in the face of the enormity (in its literal sense of vicious appallingness) of the difference between that world and our own; the mark of a wholly successful satire, then, and this particular production is a triumph.

Fargo (Channel 4), as reimagined by Noah Hawley with the blessing of the Coen brothers, returned for its fourth ambitious series, huger and sprawlier than ever: indeed, it’s a panoply not just of life in Kansas, Missouri, but of America in the 20th century. Which is both its triumph and its fatal weakness.

The early episodes give us, gloriously, the tale of successive waves of tribal crime gangs in that city up to 1950: Jewish first, then Irish, then Italian, then black – and vignettes in which the youngest son of the head of warring cabals is adopted by the head of the upstart clan, and vice versa, to keep some semblance of “peace”. If true, this would indeed have been seven beezers of intriguing, and worth watching for that alone. In the horizonless vistas of imagination it’s somehow rendered almost nugatory, given that there’s just so much damned else going on. Sadly, out of all this, one and only one message runs, on and on: at the heart of the 20th century, at the heart of white America, it was a wee bit shite to be poor and in a minority.

There are tremendous performances throughout, not least from Emyri Crutchfield and Jessie Buckley, and the whole thing is festooned with style, and enough surreal nods to the little town Fargo of old, and it’s just immensely, cloyingly, watchable. I’m just unsure whether the Coens in 1996 quite envisaged their creation becoming, ever, a – sexy, admittedly; also violent, glam, witty, beastly, empathic – TED Talk.

I was alarmed beyond mere tears by the two nights of Three Families (BBC One), writer Gwyneth Hughes’s tour de force dramatisation of the, to my mind, insanities of the Northern Ireland abortion laws until shockingly recently. Draconian to a point that might have shocked ancient Athens, they led, in the worst of instances, to mothers being ordered to carry dead babies to term. And we were shown the worst of these (true, yet disguised) instances; the BBC made no bones about having picked its side, but it’s honestly rather difficult to see how it might have reasonably picked another.

It wasn’t necessarily subtle. There was scant time given to the pro-life side, those whose honest convictions need them to argue abortion is a sin. We saw, instead, whispery communities too piously keen to condemn their own; and the one Belfast Marie Stopes clinic beleaguered by activists, thrusting plastic foeti into the hands of despairing girls. I bow to none in my defence of free speech – let the arguments ring out and only then be shot down – but can see clearly the need for separation zones. But that all this was going on, only 12 miles off the coast of Scotland, until 2019, and the fact it took the collapse of Stormont for Westminster to step in and amend, hurrah – well, I can only apologise for my blindness. Such a valuable eye-opener: actors Sinéad Keenan and Amy James-Kelly tenderly stand out throughout.

I can’t quite remember when I’ve heard, from the off, so many instances of the N-word in a primetime offering as in Amazon’s The Underground Railroad, and all, I suspect director Barry Jenkins would argue, entirely, horribly justified. This, then, is his traumatic, inspired take on Colson Whitehead’s bestseller, of the escape route in the early 1800s for slaves from the tyrannical cotton evil south to the “safer” – ha, hollow laugh, ha – north.

As in the book, Jenkins magically realises the actual routes (a network of abolitionists with secret cellars, waystay safe points) as an actual railway, and imagines this thrillingly well. As if our saddened hearts weren’t in our mouths already. Every twitch and jottle of Cora and Caesar’s flight, and subsequent reinventions, is haunted by our fear for them, and haunted, too, by pursuers with a personal feud. Despairing and inventive in equal measure – and also slow, measured, magisterial, hateful – it is, so far, a minor masterpiece.

On a lighter note, as if it could be anything other, Motherland (BBC Two) again. The genius of this is that it doesn’t pretend to shy from standard sitcom trope: so we get lice panic in the school, angst over catchment areas, Mother’s Day. It’s just that the writing, and the subsequent cringes, are just so splendidly cleverer than anything we’ve been used to.