The Best TV Show Of The Last Decade Has Been Out For A Year, And You Haven’t Even Heard Of It
From the director of 'This Is England' and with a score by PJ Harvey, 'The Virtues' is as good as television gets.
Content warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault.
In the opening five minutes of The Virtues, the 2019 miniseries from This Is England director Shane Meadows, a man named Joe (Stephen Graham) makes himself a cup of tea, runs the bath, stands by a window, and begins to silently cry.
There is stress, and then there is the kind of stress that Joe is under. A recovering alcoholic whose wife has left him for a cleaner-cut man, taking their son with her, Joe appears to be in the process of being dragged down through the centre of the Earth. When the collapse comes, it is surprising only in its intensity — across the space of one howling, violent night, Joe relapses, eventually awakening in a filthy pile of vomit and blood on his living room floor.
But through the chaos of inebriation, Joe peeks something — a bunch of strange memories that come bubbling up from his very distant past; images of violence that he cannot entirely situate. Barely aware of what he’s doing or why, Joe travels back to the Irish town of his birth, reconnects with the sister who has long thought him to be dead, and tries, in his own fumbling way, to re-tell himself the story of his life.
The Virtues Is Essential Television
If that makes The Virtues sound almost unrepentantly bleak, that’s because it is. Above everything else, the miniseries is about trauma — at least, “about” trauma in the way that horror movies are “about” blood. We learn as Joe does that there is a jagged epicentre of pain in his past, and working out precisely who hurt him and why is the lurching forward momentum of the plot. In that way, it’s something of a mystery story, albeit one where cases are not solved as much as abandoned when their wincing blows get too much.
Indeed, every answer begets only more questions, which is the point. Being a victim of trauma and being an alcoholic, as Joe is, are experiences marked primarily by confusion. Accounting for your own behaviour in either case becomes difficult — your life becomes a perpetual hunt for a “why”, not only to explain your hurt, but to explain the countless small decisions that make up what we refer to when we talk about “real life”. Why did I sleep with that person? Why did I have that sixth can of lager? Why did I confront my sister in the driveway of her house?
And so it goes for Joe. Played by Graham in one of the most astonishing small screen performances of the last few decades, Joe seems to be watching his own life unspooling before him. Occasionally, he lurches out, trying to fix things. But he is playing a passive role in his own development, both when he regresses and when, eventually and with pain, he reaches catharsis.
Those who have seen Graham as a gangster in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, or the central antagonist of This Is England, will know that he is capable of solar flares of intensity; great, crashing rages. But here, everything is played in the eyes. Sometimes, when Joe gets particularly bad news, he doesn’t say anything at all; he just flinches backwards, as though he’s stood too close to the tracks and a train has flown loudly by. Other times, he sucks great flutes of air through his clenched teeth, whimpering.
He is a diagram of hurt. Occasionally, as when his ex wife gently prods at him to find out if he plans to start drinking again before taking him in a frail, strange hug, it seems impossible that anyone could suffer in the way that he is suffering. There is just too much pain there.
And so The Virtues shies away from ever having characters break down into long, wrenching monologues, or those arch Hollywood arguments where two characters admit every private feeling they’ve ever had. It needs neither cheap narrative device. As much is communicated in little asides — Joe watching his child eating a plate of salad, trying, as best he can, to keep himself from falling into a wet, raw wreck. Or later, when they are both upstairs, and Joe tells his son that he can call David, his mum’s new boyfriend, ‘dad’ if he wants to, and then goes quiet while the sides of the room get pulled away.
In The End: Grace
We have seen art about alcoholism and about childhood abuse before, of course. These days, such traumas are used by Hollywood as easy shortcuts to empathy — even Iron Man had a problem with the bottle. But what makes The Virtues different is its attention to detail, and its eventual grace.
Meadows has admitted in an interview — only one; he now never wants to talk about it again — that he is himself a victim of a historic abuse that it took him a long time to account for. You can tell. That explains Meadows’ patience; his knowledge that memories of long-repressed pain come at you sideways, out of a kind of murk. Joe’s slow understanding of what happened to him when he was young and vulnerable comes in fits and spurts — revelations are abrupt and almost paralysingly upsetting. There is no easy arc here, because nor is there one in life.
When The Virtues comes shuddering to a halt, it does so messily.
When The Virtues comes shuddering to a halt, it does so messily. Agonisingly. The final 20 minutes of the feature-length climactic episode are as intense and unrelenting as anything that has been broadcast by a major television network in quite some time. You don’t watch the final scene. It happens to you. And then you are left there, stunned and hurt, and forced, as Joe has been, to make sense of what has happened.
But there is some joy here, too. Or not joy, precisely, but release. Joe doesn’t “recover” — there are some things that you never recover from — but we watch as he slowly puts the scattered pieces of his past together into the order required to keep living his life. And there’s a kind of grace in that, too.
‘The Virtues’ is now available to stream on Stan.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.