The “Red Riding” trilogy: ’70s England as hell

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:04:00 +0000

In your average gritty British TV crime serial, an imperfect but relatively decent character like hotshot crime reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) of "Red Riding: 1974," or crusading Manchester cop Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) of "Red Riding: 1980," would ride into town and prove just big enough to part the seas of criminality and official corruption closing in on all sides. Sure, there would be setbacks, betrayals and unexpected reversals on the road toward catching the bad guys. Our hero might cross a moral or ethical line here and there, and spend a few late nights boozing too much or shagging a pulchritudinous colleague. But the outcome would never be in doubt.

In the "Red Riding" trilogy, a powerfully addictive series of interlinked crime dramas made by Britain's Channel 4 and adapted from the genre-shifting "Northern noir" series by novelist David Peace, doubt is the only constant. Arguably, the point of the "Red Riding" series, both in print and on screen, is to turn conventional crime fiction upside down and expose it as a comforting sham that's designed to shield us from the real world's brutality and greed. Guys like Dunford and Hunter may style themselves after Raymond Chandler's knights errant -- men who can walk the meanest streets of Yorkshire because they are not themselves mean -- but the social cesspool beneath the superficial provincial quiet of late-'70s northern England sucks away their morality, their decency and even their courage.

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The “Red Riding” trilogy: ’70s England as hell