Somewhere in the dark and arcane recesses of the British television industry, there is a strange machine that dictates what makes it to our screens. Commissioners pull a lever, gears whir, steam spurts from mysterious nozzles and it spits out a script. The input function is simple: take a beloved domestic TV star and put them in an under-appreciated region of our shores, add in a dose of low-stakes intrigue and maybe (specially applied via a stars-and-stripes trigger) an American guest actor. It is this machine that has delivered us ITV’s Maryland: Suranne Jones heads to the Isle of Man to unearth her mother’s secret past, encountering there, for some reason, Stockard Channing.
More specifically, Becca (Jones) is forced to reconnect with her estranged sister Rosaline (House of the Dragon’s Eve Best) after their mother is found, unexpectedly, dead and, unexpectedly, in the Isle of Man. What has their mother been doing in this green and pleasant tax haven, when she’s supposed to be caravanning in Wales? Becca and Rosaline are cheap chalk and expensive cheese; Becca dealing with a truculent teenager, and Rosaline with a recurring health scare (in her opening scene, she takes a Zoom call during a doctor’s examination, so the audience knows she’s a busy lady). But when they discover their mother’s secret home on the island – complete with walls of framed photographs of her girls – they are pulled together into a journey of self-reflection. “Do you know how many Sunday dinners I’ve made?” a frazzled Becca despairs to her big sis. “And not once has she mentioned any of this?”
