Hatfields & McCoys

They sure were ornery back in them days, way out West.  Well, west of the UK.  To Americans it's a sort of Eastern Western.  Everyone wore brown (or maybe they were just downright dirty); the men carried guns, spat tobacco at every opportunity and cussed all the time.  The women just looked about ten years older than they were and wore cross expressions, which is hardly surprising given the stupidity of their menfolk.

This is a feud so famous that their names have passed into a colloquialism for discord, but as this TV series shows, it had its origins in nothing very much more than a difference of opinion, and continued for decades to the detriment of several members of both families, who were either killed or, in one case, kept apart from their loved one.  (Not that Johnse Hatfield was exactly faithful to Roseanna McCoy - he eventually married her cousin Nancy.  Nice.)

The production features, under all those beards, Kevin Costner, Tom Berenger and a fair few English actors, who assume Virginian/Kentucky accents with varying success.  Sarah Parish (sans beard) also appears as Hatfield's long-suffering wife and matriarch of the clan, while Mare Winningham, ex-brat packer, is her opposite number in the McCoy tribe.  It's all quite fun in a so-glad-I-didn't-live-then kind of a way, and it looks and feels suitably grimy and backwoods, but... while at bottom it's a condemnation of the futility of violence, we can't quite get beyond the feeling that it's one lot of ignorant hillbillies with grubby beards attacking another lot of ignorant hillbillies with grubby beards for no very good reason.  Well, it is a Western, so what did we expect?

Leaving

It's probably hard to advertise a drama about a married woman's affair with a much younger man without making it look both cliched and seedy, and the trailers for 'Leaving' did it no favours.  Some surprise, then, that rather than leaving (sorry, irrestible pun) at the first break, this proved watchable.

Helen McCrory has surely by now assumed the role once reserved for Helen Mirren and Barbara Flynn, that of the thinking man's cupcake.  Although as Julie, she might have spared a thought for her decent and not particularly dull hubby, who had reached a similarly comfortable groove in their marriage, the circumstances of the relationship were deftly written and if the coincidental meeting at the hospital was unlikely, it was a minor flaw in an otherwise unusually sensitive production.  It's written by Tony Marchant, proving yet again that without a good script, a so-so premise goes nowhere.

Aaron (Callum Turner) falls initially for Julie's love of her job, which rekindles his jaded emotions after his girlfriend has jilted him to marry his brother.  It's an unusual definition of a role model, but McCrory is perfectly cast as a spirited, passionate woman at the height of her powers, whose strengths are overlooked or taken for granted.

Oh and nobody got killed, which is refreshing.  Fingers crossed for the entire cast surviving the next two episodes.