Sherwood (BBC) 3/5 Monica Dolan and Stephen Dillane as criminal couple the Bransons are chilling additions to Sherwood. Photo: BBC/House Prods THE first season of Sherwood (BBC1, Sun-Mon, August 25-26) in 2022 was, by common consent, a near-flawless piece of television drama. Writer James Graham’s six-parter, about a bow and arrow-wielding killer on a spree in a depressed, disenfranchised Nottingham mining village where the deep and painful rifts caused by the miners’ strikes of the 1980s have never healed, combined one of TV’s most popular genres, murder mystery, with human and political drama to dazzling effect.
Graham, who was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was inspired by a pair of real-life murders in the area in 2004, and also drew on his own personal experiences. The result was a series that felt deeply, richly authentic. The reviews were ecstatic and the viewing figures, by the current standards of terrestrial television, huge.
The feeling was that a second season was unnecessary; the story had been satisfactorily concluded. But television has never shown any inclination to leave well enough alone, so a second season of Sherwood is what we get. So, is it poised to join the likes of Broadchurch and Homeland in the annals of TV dramas that were derailed by poor second seasons? Too early to say for sure, but there are worrying signs.
A lot of what made the first one so compelling is still present. The setting, a mixture of the bleak and the beautiful, is as ev.