Maryland TV Review: Brothers struggle with secrets and lies

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No man is an island, but on the Isle of Man a woman, Mary, manages to build a second secret life from which she excludes her family. It is only when she dies, suddenly and inexplicably, on an Irish Sea beach that her adult daughters discover that she has spent the last few years taking root away from them.

Maryland, a new three-part ITV drama, considers how little we know about those closest to us and how wrongly we assume. It follows two middle-aged sisters – icy careerist Rosaline (Eve Best) and sensitive, conscientious Becca (Suranne Jones, announced as co-creator) – as they come to terms with their loss and the blinding realization that they’ve never owned a real sense of who their mother was. As they gradually piece together how and why the latter lived and died, the brothers also begin exchanging painful truths about their fractured relationship. In a few days of frank interaction, they learn more about each other than they have learned in years of inarticulate envy, self-doubt, and judgement.

Where the characters are confronted with shocks and revelations, the show itself is marked by a rather predictable emotional trajectory: from recrimination to regret to reconciliation. But it is elevated by these always reliable clues. While the actors are generally praised for their chemistry, here they should be recognized for cultivating a convincingly restless, swinging dynamic. Rosaline and Becca crave intimacy but create distance, switching in an instant from playful and nostalgic reminiscences to trauma-fueled fights.

But watching them both sink into grief and confusion ultimately proves more compelling than seeing them get back together. In the heavily closed third chapter, charged emotion begins to be replaced by bleary-eyed sentimentality – and it briefly introduces a thorny ethical debate that the show doesn’t feel better equipped to address.

Clearly Maryland it is not THE must-see show about troubled siblings coping with the death of a parent airing this week (i.e Succession). But it’s still eminently watchable and moving.

★★★☆☆

Available to stream on ITVX

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