Let me be your TV sommelier

Say Nothing is good, but for a fuller view of the Northern Irish story, pair it with this superb 2023 doc series

As an inveterate night owl, I struggle to make sure that not everything I watch when I ought to be in bed is a waste of time. And as a critic, when I see something I like, I tend to seek out contexts and connections, to make “pairings,” if not triplings or quadruplings; I’ll share a few of those this week, playing TV sommelier to complement (I hope) your own cultural diet. I’ll begin with one set today, and add more in a day or two. Perhaps this will become a continuing “Crritic!” series.

Say Nothing (FX/Hulu) and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (BBC/PBS)

Time and other reviewers have called Say Nothing “the must-watch political thriller of 2024,” and I can’t disagree. I was riveted by the nine-part adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s all-the-awards-winning book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018). I pretty much canceled all my other plans the week it came out.

Partly I’m fascinated by the story of an anti-colonial uprising in a western country, alongside all the dilemmas it raises about the strategy and morality of armed struggle.

But also, my family is very Irish on my mother’s side. Though they immigrated to Canada (from county Carlow) many generations back, it was to insular rural lives in a predominantly Irish and French-Canadian patch of eastern Ontario; my Murphy grandparents still had traces of Irish accents. And I’m the child of a “mixed” Catholic/Protestant marriage, which sounds ridiculous except that genuinely neither side was at all happy about it at the time. So the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland doesn’t feel as distant to me as it probably should.

Say Nothing filters a chronicle of the Troubles—the civil war in the North and bytimes in the Republic and England as well, 1969-1998—primarily through the stories of the sisters Dolours and Marian Price, who became IRA operatives at an early age, and of the family of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was disappeared as a suspected informant by the IRA in 1972.

It vividly illuminates some of the era’s horrors, alongside the romance of young revolutionary zeal, and how badly it can sour. It’s full of superb performances and setpieces. But making nonfiction into fiction is tough, and lots of nuance gets lost in Say Nothing. It underplays the parallel paramilitary violence on the unionist side, for instance. Then there’s the dubiously reductive decision to position then-Sinn Fein leader and peace negotiator Gerry Adams as practically the villain of the piece. (Keefe’s book may have some of the same biases; I haven’t read it yet.)¹

For a fuller view, Say Nothing viewers and non-viewers alike should turn to a five-part documentary series that the BBC ran last year—at the 25th anniversary of the 1998 peace agreement—called Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. It’s one of the best political documentaries I’ve ever seen.

The series resembles the “Boston Project” in Say Nothing, in which ex-participants in the Troubles told their stories on tape for release after their deaths, which is how Keefe was able to portray the Prices in such detail. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland does the same but with living and named subjects on camera. It’s composed of one-on-one interviews with former guerrillas, soldiers, victims (including the McConvilles) and others whose lives were twisted by the conflict.

For you music people, they also include the proprietor of a non-denominational Belfast record store, and some other proudly anti-sectarian old punk rockers. I was proud of them too.

These testimonies are grounded by historical footage, news clips, and other visual documentation. (The director James Bluemel previously made a series in the same format called Once Upon a Time in Iraq, which I haven’t yet watched. It must not end as positively.) The details are difficult to see and hear, but throughout we find these human beings coping (or failing to cope) with their bitterness, confusion, and regret. Often they will stop and say something like, “I know that must sound horrible, but I’m talking about me back then.” (My quotes are approximations; I didn’t take exact notes.) In the final hour, especially, many of the subjects wrestle with the hard work of peace, as some of them call it: the incomplete process of truth and reconciliation.

As in Say Nothing, peace confronts them with whether their lives’ struggles and sacrifices were now meaningless. But here the full transformative force of peacetime comes through—as when one ex-unionist-paramilitary member boggles at the idea of his 17-year-old granddaughter handling a gun, for instance, as he did at her age. “I wouldn’t give her anything stronger than a fuckin’ strawberry milkshake, to be honest.”

As one interviewee said whose 29-year-old wife and father-in-law were killed in their fish shop in the infamous 1993 Shankill Road IRA bombing, the people of Northern Ireland had to give up their grievances “to give our children a fightin’ chance at making a life here.” Any insistence on so-called resolution, the myth of closure, trying to right every wrong, would only lead back into the cycle of violence. In the end, people were always going to have to compromise. The unforgivable was always going to have to be forgiven.

It’s impossible to watch Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland without thinking of all the places in the world where that realization has not dawned. What’s astonishing is that it makes one imagine that someday, it might.

---

An extra sip: If you haven’t seen Derry Girls, Lisa McGee’s brilliant sitcom about a clique of Catholic high-school girls growing up in the last years of the Troubles, well, wha’ nah? Humane more than political, it’s about the banal absurdity of life in an unlivable situation. But it rises to the moment in its finale set on the day of the 1998 peace referendum. (Plus, Northern Irish director Michael Lennox, who did all of Derry Girls, helmed four of the parts of Say Nothing.)

Say Nothing streams on Disney+ as well as FX and Hulu, and Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland is available via the BBC in the UK or PBS in the U.S. In Canada you may have to get more creative. Derry Girls is on Netflix most places, I think.

To be continued…

The wee shites of Derry Girls.

1. It may be righteous of Keefe and sexy for the TV producers to “expose” Adams, countering his overly sanctified image as the architect of the Good Friday agreement with the truth that he (transparently) denies about his violent IRA past. But painting him as both a hypocrite and a sellout is simplistic. No doubt Adams is a ruthless egotist, like pretty much any leader who ever made history. But everyone at those peace talks knew exactly what the other participants had been party to, and tacitly agreed to let each other pretend they didn’t. Otherwise they couldn’t have justified negotiating with each other—the only people who had the sway to end the violence. Frankly the world could use more such hypocritical sellouts right now.