As 2010 saw the rebirth of the excellent 1970s’ series Upstairs Downstairs into an equally formidable series, this year BBC brought us an updated take on another classic from that decade: South Riding. The 2011 reinvention of the classic series had some large shoes to fill, and while it fell short in some spots, for the most part South Riding succeeded in recreating the social nuances of a small town and one woman’s desires to make her mark on the community through her efforts at an all-girls school. Playing off of small town dynamics painted against the canvas of a Post-World War I-era England, South Riding is a well-acted mini-series with only a few flaws in dialogue and story.
Newly returned to South Riding, Yorkshire from London, Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin) returns takes on the position of headmistress at the local school for girl with big dreams for the school as both an educational and social institution. Her ideas of female-empowerment, of girls being educated for the sake of holding important jobs, clashes with the more old-fashioned beliefs of many in South Riding. She soon discovers an assortment of friends and enemies eager to support or undermine, respectively, her ambitions.
If South Riding has anything going in its favor, it’s the powerhouse performance of Anna Maxwell Martin as the fiery-haired protagonist. She’s an icon of women’s rights in an era when the thought was just a glimmer a highly patriarchal society’s eye. She has an excellent foil in the form of David Morrissey as wealthy landowner Robert Carne, but with Peter Firth, Douglas Henshall, Charlie May Clark, and Penelope Wilton rounding out the cast, it’s hard to take note of any one of them in particular as they all do a fantastic job.
Like the 2010 version of Upstairs Downstairs, South Riding’s most notable failure comes from the writers attempting to do too much in too little; consequently many major plot points are mere shadows of what they could have been if given twice as much time to develop. Consequently, there’s far too much exposition in the dialogue so the writers can attempt to tell us about all the things happening that they don’t have time to show.
DVD Bonus Features
There are none.
"South Riding (2011)" is on sale May 17, 2011 and is not rated. Drama. Directed by Diarmuid Lawrence. Written by Andrew Davies, Winifred Holly. Starring Anna Maxwell Martin, David Morrissey, Douglas Henshall, Peter Firth, Penelope Wilton, Charlie Clark.
