The trailer for Say Nothing emphasizes the capers and heists that mark the series’ first episodes , but FX’s new adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe ’s spellbinding 2018 book is fundamentally a tragic story illuminated by glimmers of hope. A widowed mother of ten is abducted from her home by her neighbors, in front of her children, never to be seen again. Two sisters who vow to give their lives for the promise of a united Ireland nearly die while on hunger strike in prison for having car-bombed London’s Old Bailey and Ministry of Agriculture.
A revolutionary leader builds a successful political career and legacy as a peacemaker while his closest friends and allies grieve and rage against his denial of their shared history. Everyone struggles to make meaning of the violence they either perpetrated, suffered, or both during The Troubles , the peculiarly benign name given to the nearly 30-year period of intense sectarian violence between unionist (mostly Protestant) and republican (mostly Catholic) paramilitaries over the political and social fate of the six counties that make up Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland, depending on your view of history and political bent). After most of what is now the Republic of Ireland won its independence from Great Britain in 1920, Britain’s formal retention of Northern Ireland in 1922 established a dramatically two-tiered state, where Protestants enjoyed far more political, economic, and social power than Catholics.
In the 1960.
