Stream it or ignore it?

How would you feel if you found out that one of your parents is leading a secret second life and the only way to find out is if the parent dies in a completely unexpected place? A new British drama series airs in the United States on PBS Masterpiece gives us such a scenario.

MARYLAND: Stream it or ignore it?

Opening shot: Shore scenes. A man stops in his tracks on the beach when he sees someone he knows lying unconscious in the sand. He runs to her and discovers that she no longer has a pulse.

The essential: During a busy morning before going to work, Becca (Suranne Jones) of a strange number; authorities say the woman found dead on the beach was her mother, but they need to go to the Isle of Man to identify her. Becca is distraught but confused; she thought her mother was visiting Wales. Why was she on the Isle of Man?

Becca calls her sister Rosaline (Eve Best), who is in a doctor’s office having her breasts examined after what we think is a mastectomy. She takes the news with less emotion but with just as much distress. Since Rosaline is in London, 200 miles away, Becca must reluctantly go tell her father Richard (George Costigan). The sisters decide to travel to the Isle of Man together to identify the body.

Things between Becca and Rosaline haven’t been great since Rosaline’s illness, and Rosaline hasn’t seen her mother much since either. Becca, however, sees her mother every two weeks and talks to her on the phone. So when the sisters discover that their mother was discovered by a “friend who was meeting her for a walk,” they have no idea who this person is. They will have to stay in town during the autopsy, before their mother can be returned to them. They get the number of Pete (Hugh Quarshie), the friend who found her.

The next day, the sisters went to the address where she was staying. They are shocked when it is a regular house, not a B&B. When Rosaline finds a spare key and enters. The sisters are shocked to see the walls covered with photos of the two of them, indicating that their mother lived there.

When Pete doesn’t answer his phone after a few calls, Rosaline finds a phone book containing his address. She and Becca meet him in his driveway; Rosaline bombards him with pointed questions, as if they were having an affair. At one point, he asks them to leave because he can’t answer these questions about his friend, even though they come from the girls she always talks about.

It’s up to Cathy (Stockard Channing), an American who makes a living selling weed and other drugs to the island’s elderly, to come and explain what their mother was doing on the Isle of Man. It turns out she was adopted as a baby and reunited with her birth mother on the Isle of Man eight years before; the house she lived in was inherited from this biological mother, whom she had known during the last years of her life.

What shows will this remind you of? Marylandcreated by Jones and Anne-Marie O’Connor, has a little feeling of Bad sisterseven if it’s less dark than this show.

Our opinion : Maryland is a limited series of three 45-minute episodes, so in essence it’s structured more like a 135-minute feature film, telling a complete story that has more or less two intertwined parts. As Becca and Rosaline reveal this secret life of their mother, they try to resolve the frost that has developed between them in recent years. When the show focuses on the dynamic between Jones and Best’s characters, that’s where it shines.

A scene where Becca tries to break the tension between her and Rosaline by walking on walls like they did when they were kids leads directly into an argument about where Rosaline resented Becca and their mother for something that happened. came by while they were taking care of her when she was sick. Roasline says, “you two and your thriving cult of caring,” referring to this era. We think the roots of Rosaline’s resentment lie in the fact that Becca had more in common with their mother than she did, and all of this came to light while they were caring for her.

Deep emotions are explored here, and wounds are exposed each time they learn something about their mother that indicates she was lying to both of them and their father. Of course, wounds can be healed, and that’s what we think is the focus of this series. The sisters will rediscover their bond as they discover what their mother was looking for. They may never understand why their mother wouldn’t tell anyone about the last eight years of her life, but the journey to find out as much as possible will bring the sisters together.

The side stories have the potential to be interesting, but we have a feeling they won’t be given enough time to make an impact. There’s Rosaline’s sarcastic banter with a taxi driver named Jacob (Dean Lennox Kelly). Cathy is looking for a substance that seems very important to her. Becca’s husband Jim (Andrew Knott) appears to be breaking down while caring for his father-in-law Richard, while his youngest daughter Molly (Yasmin Davies) is having trouble at school. The three short episodes just don’t seem to give all of these stories enough space, but we’ll just have to wait and see on that.

Sex and skin: Oh, there’s an indication that Rosaline is having an affair with her much younger boss? subordinate? – Nick (Ed White), but we don’t know if this story is going anywhere.

Starting shot: Becca and Rosaline spend the night at the house where their mother lived on the island, both sleeping in the bed she could have shared with another man (they found men’s pajamas in the room).

Sleeping Star: Rhiannon Clements, who plays Lauren, Becca’s eldest daughter, who seems to be an emotional rock to the other three members of her family.

Most pilot line: Rosaline seems to have a knack for telling people that her mother died at a time when the person hearing the news feels like shit for their behavior right before saying it. She did it with Nick as he tried to kiss her, and she did it with Jacob as he told the sisters to say hello to the fairies as he led them across the bridge to the island.

Our call: Spread it. When Maryland focuses on Becca and Rosaline’s bond while searching for answers about their mother, the series works best, thanks to the performances of Jones and Best. The rest of the stories surrounding the sisters seem like filler that won’t really have much to do with the overall direction of the series.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but he’s under no illusions: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and elsewhere.