Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Say Nothing’ On FX/Hulu, A Drama That Spans Four Decades During The Troubles In Northern Ireland

The new FX/Hulu drama Say Nothing is a retelling of The Troubles, a battle between Catholics and Protestants that tore Northern Ireland apart from the 1960s through the 1990s. Like most battles that are hundreds of years in the making, the issues are complex and the people on each side are there for complicated reasons. Trying to capture that time period in a limited series would seem like a daunting task. But this series seems to have cracked that problem.

SAY NOTHING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “The thing about Irish people is that we’ve been fighting over the same shite for 800 years,” says a voice as a map of Ireland and Great Britain comes up.

The Gist: After a quick explanation of “The Troubles,” the decades-long struggle to reunite Ireland, where Catholics in Northern Ireland were considered second-class citizens to the British-backed Protestants, and the Irish Republican Army continued to pressure the British government with bombings, shootings and other attacks.

We start in Belfast in 1972. Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a mother of ten, is kidnapped from her tiny apartment in the Divis flats by a group of masked thugs, and one who was unmasked: Her next-door neighbor.

Twenty-nine years later, a man named Mackers (Seamus O’Hara) is recording “Participant H” for The Belfast Project, which is firsthand accounts of people on the front lines of the IRA’s battles. Dolours Price (Maxine Peake) sits with him, and is assured by Mackers that no one will hear this testimony until after she dies.

She talks about her childhood, and how she was raised by her freedom-fighting parents. She and her sister knew more about creating bombs than about regular kid stuff. When Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) were teenagers, in the late 1960s, they insisted that peaceful protests were the way to affect change, not the violence that their parents were experienced with.

But when they and the group that they’re protesting with are hit by rocks thrown by Protestants, with the cops barely lifting a finger to help, their minds start to change. After their dad gets attacked, they go to an IRA protest at the police barracks, which is when they see that their old classmate, Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), is giving orders about what kinds of containers will make more effective fire bombs. According to Dolours, he joined the IRA at 16 and, though he’s young, the old guard seems to trust him. He tries to recruit Dolours, but not for the largely-male group on the front lines; women in the IRA are usually there for support, not battle.

Dolours tries to change that, especially after British soldiers roll through Belfast and start arresting every male freedom fighter they can find. The person she has to convince the least, though, is Adams.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The closest analogue to Say Nothing is Derry Girls, but only because both take place during The Troubles. Otherwise, they’re very different shows.

Our Take: Created by Josh Zetumer and based on the book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing takes the overview approach, starting with McConville’s kidnapping but moving through the many decades of The Troubles, basically from Dolours’ perspective.

Zetumer takes an interesting approach; instead of telling the story in a linear manner, we get Dolours’ 2001 statements to Mackers driving the narrative. Normally, we might get annoyed at this, but The Troubles were a messy time, with all sorts of factions working for both the cause and at cross purposes. There is enough of a split, even among the people in IRA, that there’s a disclaimer at the end of the episode that asserts that Adams has never admitted to being a part of the IRA, despite the show depicting him in the middle of everything.

Dolours’ perspective is a good one to examine, since she and Marian were the first female soldiers in the IRA, and they experience just how tough being in this loosely-organized army can be. Loyalties are tested, moles are ratted out, and she finds out that “the cause” isn’t as pure as she thinks.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Dolours tells Mackers that people who fight for the cause are led to believe all the sacrifices they make are for the greater good, to help reunite Ireland. “And I think people should know that it’s all lies.”

Sleeper Star: Anthony Boyle plays Brendan Hughes, who was one of the other prominent figures in the IRA starting in the late 1960s. He’s portrayed as personable but brutal when he needs to be.

Most Pilot-y Line: This might be one of those shows where putting on subtitles will be helpful; it’s not as much the Irish accents but it’s the Irish slang that gets confusing to these American ears.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Say Nothing gives an authentic view of a time period that still resonates with the people of both Ireland and Northern Ireland to this day.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.