What does ambition look like on TV today? Is it big, expensive, epic fantasies like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power or House of the Dragon or 3 Body Problem? Or is it the endlessly spiraling postmodern meta-universes of Marvel and Star Wars? Certainly, there’s great difficulty to shows like these, with their teeming casts, high production values, and long, multiseason spools of narrative, sometimes seamlessly interwoven into other existing series, movies, books, and canonical lore. But there’s also something a little bit easy about these projects, regardless of how hard they are to mount. Obviously, they’re costly, and obviously they might fail, but, all the same, as creative propositions, shows like these—built upon well-known, widely beloved IP—are safe. If ambition involves real risk, then these shows are not ambitious at all.
But there is ambition to be found on TV—risky propositions and big ideas that have somehow squeaked their way through the industry’s profoundly risk-averse gauntlet. The trouble is that so many of these shows have been limited by the limited series format. Whether it’s companies managing their risk by only signing off on single-season concepts, or creators adapting to that logic when pitching their ideas, much of the most exciting, boundary-pushing, ambitious television in the past couple of years has been end-stopped. Nathan Fielder’s avant-garde social fictions The Rehearsal and The Curse are both closed concepts. HBO’s momentous post-Vietnam thriller The Sympathizer could only ever be a one-and-done miniseries. FX’s biggest recent success, Shōgun, entered the world as a limited series, too, having completed the story of its source novel, only to be resurrected by the network for two more—potentially ill-advised—seasons at the last minute. I’m very happy that FX wants more Shōgun and that networks keep giving Nathan Fielder money for his discrete provocations, but we are losing something when we ask these ambitious artists to keep hitting singles instead of taking a swing at a home run.
FX’s newest limited series, Say Nothing, is ambitious. A multigenerational murder mystery, a careening crime saga, a boldly political historical epic about the Troubles in Belfast, and a prime showcase for a deep roster of young Irish actors, Say Nothing can be eye-popping television. Economically adapted by Joshua Zetumer from Patrick Radden Keefe’s critically acclaimed nonfiction book of the same name, the show takes nine episodes to tell the true story of Jean McConville—who disappeared without a trace in 1972—and the Irish Republican Army members who (probably) killed her. Over the course of those episodes, the show accomplishes a tremendous amount, including both honoring the memory of the disappeared and producing one of the most thoughtfully ambivalent considerations of anti-colonial violence I’ve ever seen on American television. But it just doesn’t have enough time. Everything this show does well could be expanded, and everything it does poorly, it does in a rush. With nine episodes, Say Nothing is a gutting and grand limited series; with 30 episodes it could have been something really special.
Say Nothing tells three stories that occupy three separate timelines in the show. The first of these stories is simultaneously the central organizing event of the narrative and the thing that the show spends the least time on: the disappearance of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy). McConville, a single mother of 10 children, moves to a new apartment in Belfast, develops an antagonistic relationship with some of her neighbors, and is eventually kidnapped by the IRA with their help. But there is no ransom; nor is there a body to bury, so that her family can mourn. Her ultimate fate remains a mystery for decades, but, as a framing device for the show, it haunts everything else we see.
The primary story of Say Nothing, which is intercut throughout with snippets from McConville’s homelife, is that of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast under the—alleged—leadership of Gerry Adams (Josh Finan) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This section, which takes up much of the show’s first five episodes, is absolutely gripping. Centered around the point of view of teenager Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew), these episodes have the flavor of a somewhat more melancholy Goodfellas. As we watch Dolours lose interest in nonviolent activism and become enchanted with the revolutionary energy of the IRA, we encounter this story of terrorism and resistance as essentially a coming-of-age story. As she becomes more involved, her risk increases, but so, too, does the glamour and approbation. A precocious, stylish, steely-eyed guerrilla, Dolours embodies the romance of Irish republicanism. Clandestine operations, Robin Hood–style bank robberies, passionate debates about justification and strategy, cat-and-mouse games with the British armed forces, the ever-present affirmation that these acts of youthful rebellion are also acts of deep familial responsibility—we share Dolours’s experience of all this righteousness and foolishness and ruthlessness.
The show echoes this ambivalence aesthetically. There are lots of pop music needle drops and flashy, pulse-pounding set pieces, like when a foot chase between IRA officer Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and British army officers snaps into an aerial view so we can watch his small figure navigate the mazelike network of alleys and friendly flats on his way to safety. All of this is anchored by a quartet of explosive performances. Petticrew is sensational playing Dolours Price’s radicalization from spark to flame, and Hazel Doupe is outstanding as her sister, whose investment in the cause hardens and outpaces Dolours’s over time; Finan plays the young Gerry Adams with smug intellectualism and fanatic authority, the dirtbag leftist of Belfast in the ’60s; and Boyle—who’s landed spotlight roles in Masters of the Air and Manhunt over the past year—steals the show as rakish, charismatic street general Hughes.
But any fleeting sense of fun that this ensemble generates is quickly undercut. Eventually, Adams orders Dolours to begin transporting traitors (“touts”) across the border into the Republic of Ireland to be executed, and the show stages these scenes like a descent into limbo: looming silhouettes, mist and tall grass, car headlights eerily staring into each other. The darkness of all these adrenaline-fueled scenes is only just below the surface. Their cool haircuts and leather jackets aside, these kids are soldiers in a war that only they recognize as one. These people fight because they’re oppressed, and when they kill—which they eventually, and often, do—they do so with the understanding that they’ve signed up to sacrifice their own lives in turn.
The show’s third section deals directly with the fallout from those violent youths. It’s now the 1990s, and Dolours and her peers are aged, traumatized, bitter. Replaced by older actors, our quartet resurfaces having lost much of the energy that propelled them as kids. Two events frame their burnout. The first is Gerry Adams’s rise as a politician and leader of the political party Sinn Fein. Say Nothing presents Adams, in no uncertain terms, as the architect of every act of terrorism carried out in the show’s first half, but, at the end of several episodes, a title card comes up that affirms that the real Gerry Adams contends that he was never a member of the IRA. The reason for this awkward contrivance is something like the subject of the show’s final few episodes: Not only must our characters deal with the fact that all their moral and bodily sacrifice ended up achieving only a diluted and inequitable “peace,” but they must deal with the fact that Gerry Adams won that peace by disavowing them. Dolours and Brendan turn, in fury and regret, to an oral history project called the Belfast Project, telling the full story of the Troubles, and Adams’s involvement, with the idea that, one day, the record might be set straight.
The other development that frames the more contemporary plotline is Jean McConville’s grown daughter Helen’s search for the truth about her mother. It’s how the history of Dolours and the IRA, the Belfast Project, and McConville’s disappearance are all knitted together; it’s how the show frames its own moral negotiation between the movement for Irish independence and the IRA’s violence; but it’s also not nearly enough. That this section spans little more than two episodes is Say Nothing’s main problem. While the show, rightfully, takes its time building out the world of Dolours’s youth, its strident moral clarity paired with shocking violence, the show has to cram all of its philosophy into a tight window. Say Nothing turns Dolours Price’s life into a sprawling, bloody Irish bildungsroman but sketches the McConville family in quick, broad strokes.
This is a conceptual and representational issue—how much time do the disappeared deserve?—but it’s also an issue of dramatic logistics. The young Helen appears for a scant amount of screen time across seven episodes of television, but all of a sudden, late in the series, she appears as an adult (Laura Donnelly), and, for two episodes, she has to become the show’s moral compass. This is not only true of Helen McConville, but of all the characters in the show’s final two episodes. These episodes are too long to be an epilogue but too short to build a fully fleshed out dramatic universe; characters speak mostly in cliches, repeated declarations of moral intent or regret. I lost count of the number of times that adult Dolours (Maxine Peake) asks if it was “all for nothing.” Constrained, limited, by the available time, Say Nothing becomes blunt, hurried in its final act. Having created four living, breathing characters, Say Nothing transforms them, late, into signifiers, an act which doesn’t do them—or the people they disappeared—justice.
The show that Say Nothing could have most profitably emulated is HBO’s Elena Ferrante adaptation, My Brilliant Friend. Say Nothing, of course, is based on a single (very long) nonfiction book, and My Brilliant Friend—whose fourth and final season is airing now—is based on a quartet of novels. But they also pose strangely similar predicaments as televisual adaptations. They both take place over the course of several decades, requiring multiple recastings, different actors playing a dramatic relay race with indelible characters. Both require constant, rather fleet-footed exposition about the political movements of postwar Europe. Both luxuriate in long conversations about politics and morality. Both thrive in the depiction of suffocating, life-giving small towns, where everybody knows your name and everybody judges you for everything you do. Both shows are about the crushing weight of memory, the trauma of youth, the disappointment of adulthood.
The major difference is that My Brilliant Friend has the luxury of time. It can slow-play every casting change, giving the audience time to acclimate to new actors, and giving those actors time to build characters of their own. It has time for every political argument, for every detail of life in a bygone time. More than that, as a show about memory, it can build and play off of the viewer’s own memory. Say Nothing could have done the same, but with more bank robberies.
Maybe nobody ever considered Say Nothing as a multiseason project. It is a substantial achievement as a limited series, with a cast and writers who have leaned into the nuance of this story, refusing heroes and villains, as insistent on memorializing the murdered victims of the IRA as it is on depicting the cruelty of British colonial rule in Ireland. It is a work of great difficulty and great ambition. Moreover, in a media environment that seeks to reduce risk at all costs, it is a defiantly risky proposition. It’s a risk to put money and resources behind a dark, violent saga about terrorism, starring a scarce handful of recognizable actors, but it’s also a risk to limit such a story to a nine-part episode dump. Say Nothing is a bright flash; I would love to have seen it burn for a little longer.
