In 2018 Jimmy McGovern released a six part series called BROKEN. It starred Sean Bean as a Catholic priest in a poor parish in the Liverpool area where McGovern is from. And in many ways it sounds very dark. The priest is haunted by some kind of abuse that happened in his past; the main story of the pilot is a mother so desperate to pay her bills that when her mother dies unexpectedly she hides the body for three days so that she can get her mother's pension check. Seriously, it has TOUGH stuff in it.
And yet, in the watching the series is anything but relentless. We get first communions, amazing confessions and sermons, the priest playing cards and bowling with his brothers. It's kind of wonderful in its way. In fact, I would say it might be the best show about Catholicism I've ever seen. For the life of me I've never understood why we don't have parish procedurals the same way we have police, doctor or law. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, this show very much shows the way.
The magic recipe seems to include two main ingredients plus a special sauce. On the one hand, it has a central character, Father Michael, who we follow for the whole six episodes, and who has a real arc and journey of his own.
On the other, it has a set of supporting characters who each appear only for a couple episodes, and yet when they are present, they are given pretty close to equal footing with Michael. So for instance in the first episode we are with down-on-her-luck mom Christina at least as much as we are with Michael, and certainly in more profound kinds of moments. In 103 similarly we spend a lot of time with a cop named Andrew, most of it with Michael nowhere around.
That's the procedural element, right? It's case of the week. Except--and this for me is the secret sauce of the show--instead of creating a sort of hard break between episodes, aka this is Christina's episode, this is Andrew's, this is Helen's--McGovern will introduce characters in one episode in a background way and then pull them to the forefront in later episodes. We meet Andrew at the top of 102, when he's forced to arrest Christina for what she's done. Then suddenly at the end of 102 Andrew is part of a team of cops involved with a serious incident that turns him into the main character in 103 and a recurring character after that.
In 102 we also meet Roz, who has a serious gambling problem and sees trouble on the horizon. (She's played by Paula Malcolmson, and I would say no matter how much you loved her in RAY DONOVAN, DEADWOOD or SONS OF ANARCHY, this is her greatest role.)
She recurs on her own for a number of episodes before suddenly in 104 we meet her kids, including daughter Chloe. And then suddenly in 106 it's Chloe, not Roz that is central.
So basically the way McGovern writes the show is like a relay race. Characters are introduced, and then eventually they take up the baton themselves for a times, only to hand it off somewhere in the next episode. Sometimes they recur after that, or some element of their story continues; sometimes they really don't (or at least not until the end). And sometimes the same thing happens within an episode--there's a character we meet early in the pilot that seems like the heavy, and then suddenly near the end out of the blue they get a tremendous moment of their own.
The net effect is to give the overall series a wholistic feel. We're not watching six stories, we're watching one, the story of a community. There's something satisfying about that approach that I don't find you get from your standard procedural. And yet it absolutely functions as one.
