‘Better than the Godfather': The Red Riding Trilogy comes to Netflix, 15 years after its TV debut

Telegraph

5 days ago

The Red Riding Trilogy is now on Netflix. Read that as both a recommendation and a warning. On the one hand, Red Riding – a three-film adaptation of David Peace's four novels, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, released on Channel 4 in 2009 – is an undoubted high watermark of modern British television. But on the other, it is a dark (and, to these eyes, wonderful) night of the soul.
Red Riding is a story of crime and police corruption in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s. It dibs and dabs from real life, building a sustained, diseased epic that sets the Yorkshire Ripper murders alongside a set of (fictional) child abductions and killings.
When it was released in 2009 it came with an august cinematic pedigree. Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) adapted the screenplays, and three directors also better known for their work in cinema were assigned one film each: Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited), James Marsh (Man on Wire) and Anand Tucker (And When Did You Last See Your Father?)
The acting talent was equally illustrious. In the first film, The Year of Our Lord 1974, Andrew Garfield, who had just won a Bafta for his role in Boy A, starred as a young crime journalist on the case of a group of missing schoolgirls – one of them turned up with swan's wings literally stitched on to her back. The right people in Hollywood were paying attention: Garfield would go on to major stardom, including the plum gig of Spider-Man and being twice Oscar-nominated for Best Actor in Hacksaw Ridge and Tick, Tick Boom!
In the second, The Year of Our Lord 1980, the superb Paddy Considine played a Manchester detective conducting an internal investigation into the team working the Ripper case. And in the last, The Year of Our Lord 1983, Mark Addy portrayed a local solicitor representing a young man with extreme learning difficulties (a young Daniel Mays) who was imprisoned for the child murders in the first film. Addy went on to star in Game of Thrones. Mays has appeared in everything from Line of Duty to the recent Bookish.
The supporting cast, meanwhile, was as strong an ensemble as television could muster, pre-streamer: Lesley Sharp, Rebecca Hall, David Morrissey, Sean Bean, Warren Clarke, Maxine Peake, Jim Carter and Peter Mullan, for starters. Sean Harris (Mission: Impossible) inevitably turns up for some added horror.
It is arguably the best British ensemble cast ever put together for television, and in the actors attracted to Grisoni's scripts and Peace's source material, Red Riding showed that TV was just as worthy of any A-Lister's attention as movies. Since 2009, of course, any qualitative distinction between a television and a film actor has all but disappeared.
Grisoni's scripts took Peace's dazzling, intense poetry and used the extended duration of television to give it some structure. Many novels have been deemed unfilmable, but Red Riding, a fractured, hallucinatory narrative in print, showed that with pacing, screen time and the right script, huge projects that spent years scaring writers (and executives) off could work on television.
When it was first broadcast, Red Riding was labelled 'a place so dark even Darth Vader would have trouble going there' in these pages. David Thomson in The New York Review of Books wrote, 'Red Riding is better than The Godfather, but it leaves you feeling so much worse.' The New York Times said it was a place 'where men and terror run wild, and beauty exists only in the cinematography and some of the performances.
'The blood that runs through the 'Red Riding' trilogy,' an unsure review continued, 'begins as a river that races and then rages until it floods this dank, dark, pitiless world in misery.'
But Mark Addy probably summed it up best, with: 'Yeah, it's not an advert for tourism in Yorkshire.'
A cheery sofa-snuggler for you and all the family, this undoubtedly isn't. But as a televisual equivalent of a Bacon triptych, as a nihilistic vision that reaches out from the small screen and envelops like a cold sweat, Red Riding was way ahead of its time. True Detective, HBO's 2014 crime drama, substituted Yorkshire for the US deep south, but followed Red Riding's sense of a Dantean descent through the circles of hell. Unsurprisingly, True Detective's creator Nic Pizzolatto turned out to be a Red Riding fan.
This sense of regional gothic and the marauding weirdness of local cultural traditions (leading to the matchless line, 'This is the North, where we do what we want') then spread across television, from Hans Rosenfeldt's The Bridge (2011) to Netflix's Ozark (2017). It has become, in some ways, the dominant theme in all TV thrillers — if you want to freak them out, take them to a place that's the same, but different.
However, the success of this strategy relies almost entirely on convincing atmospherics, and again this is where Red Riding was a game changer. While James Marsh's middle episode was shot on 35mm film, the first and third films were on the Red One digital camera, first introduced in 2007. It allowed similar quality to 35mm, but was also highly effective in low, natural light. It soon became the gold standard for realism, but Red Riding was one of the first to bring that gritty intensity. And it worked: in the US, the series was released in cinemas as a 305-minute feature, and it still looks sensational in HD on your ginormous flatscreen today.
Yet if you're reading all of this and thinking that unremitting gloom isn't what you're looking for in 2025 (perhaps because there's gloom enough in the real world to make a Hey Duggee binge a preferable choice), there are two things to note.
One is that the series has never felt more pertinent, bearing in mind what has happened to mainstream politics on both sides of the Atlantic in the intervening years.
'I think it's about the sense that [it's not possible] to be a little bit corrupt,' said David Morrissey at the time. 'It's like being a little bit pregnant. If you're corrupt, you're corrupt… It's like there's no such thing as a small war. There are consequences.'
Secondly, Red Riding is not inhumane. It pushed the boundaries but it was also one of the first series to ask what was too dark and where to draw the line, particularly regarding the young, female body count. Liza Marshall, the then- Channel 4 head of drama, who commissioned the programme, said at the time: 'There is an audience for dark crime, but I think we needed to pull back a little bit from some of the extreme darkness. I just couldn't countenance watching that many hours of television… and then, in the end, it's all really bleak.'
As such, Grisoni's adaptation actually turned down the darkness dial from Peace's merciless novels – the final film includes a coda that is not in the books and offers at least a glimpse of redemption.
'It was an emotional reaction to the material,' Grisoni said. 'An emotional reaction to two and a half years of being in this inferno that David Peace had constructed. David doesn't save anyone. Whereas I needed to.'
A final note: there is one further mystery that comes with the Red Riding trilogy. As you'll have noticed, there were four novels, but only three films. Grisoni wrote a full screenplay for 1977, but budgetary constraints meant it was never made.
So go on Netflix – this is the North, after all, where you can do what you want.