The first series of James Graham’s Sherwood, shown in June 2022, introduced us to the Nottinghamshire town of Ashfield, a former mining community devastated by pit closures and the miserable aftermath of the 1984 miners’ strike. The town was torn by personal and political feuds, and the murder of former miner Gary Jackson was like throwing gasoline on long-smouldering embers.
As this second series opens, we find a few things have changed. DCS Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has now stepped aside from the police to head the new Violence Intervention Team, which aims to provide support networks for young people rather than merely waiting for them to commit crimes and then arresting them. “We can’t enforce our way out of every social problem,” as he puts it.
Ashfield also has a new Sheriff of Nottingham in the shape of councillor Lisa Waters (Ria Zmitrowicz, pictured below), who embodies a sense of a progressive new broom. Not only does she have a wife, Sandy (Aisling Loftus), but she’s leading the local opposition to the development of a new coal mine, being proposed by arch-capitalist Franklin Warner (Robert Lindsay). Warner’s bullish pitch is that the mine project not only offers the prospect of a swathe of new jobs but also somehow embodies the traditional Nottinghamshire spirit of rebelliousness and self-determination. Ms Waters, on the other hand, espouses net zero and wants new employment to come from high-tech industries, not a return to digging holes in the ground.
Yet many things haven’t changed, and old enmities are still simmering. The blue touch paper is lit by a sudden, violent encounter between Nicky Branson (Sam Buchanan) and Ryan Bottomley (a terrifying Oliver Huntingdon). This escalates with vertiginous speed from a bout of pushing and shoving into a fatal shooting incident, with Branson the victim. Long story short, Branson’s parents, Roy (Stephen Dillane) and Ann (Monica Dolan), want revenge. To do this, they need unwitting eyewitness Ronan Sparrow (Bill Jones) to identify the shooter. But the Sparrows and the Bransons are rival crime families with roots going way back, and any truce between them can never be better than an uneasy one.
Underpinning the incipient chaos is a tangle of historic baggage, some known and some hidden. For instance, Ronan has just been knocked sideways by the accidental discovery that he has a half-sister, Rachel (Christine Bottomley), a fact concealed from him by his mother. But he’d barely been introduced to her before both of them became embroiled in the shooting incident, which is now threatening to set off a chain reaction of retribution.
It’s gripping but it’s grim (the going gets super-dark in episode two). Graham has loosely based his story on a real-life murder from 2004, but his fictional version escalates into a saga of battling dynasties, as if Graham was at least partially playing with the notion of a classic Western mysteriously transplanted to Nottinghamshire. Tragically, innocent bystanders are going to suffer the consequences as relations between the Sparrows and the Bransons (pictured above) turn toxic.
What isn’t in doubt is that it’s a pretext for a string of powerful performances by an impressive cast. Give it up for Lorraine Ashbourne and Philip Jackson as Daphne and Mickey Sparrow, David Harewood and Sharlene Whyte as Denis and Pam Bottomley, and Bethany Asher as as their daughter Stephie. And there are some lovely little moments between Morrissey and Lesley Manville’s Julie Jackson, as they tiptoe through the quicksand of the fearful past.
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