Critics consider the British anthology crime drama series Time, which was created by Jimmy McGovern, to be must-watch television, and they’re more right than they might realize.
Each of these three seasons features a different set of inmates and staff within His Majesty’s Prison Service. A staff member (Stephen Joseph Graham) in season one to cite several examples starts smuggling contraband into prison to protect his son who is imprisoned elsewhere, a mother (Jodie Whittaker) sentenced for hacking an electricity box in season two to care for her children, and different young male inmates attack each other while a staff member (David Tennant) tries to maintain his standards even as his marriage is disintegrating in the third season.
All three include a prison chaplain and Catholic nun (Siobhan Finneran), who plays a bigger part in the second and third season. She reveals when confronted in the second that she is having an affair and admits in the third that she is enduring a crisis of faith that culminates with a decision to leave the church and yet continue her social work elsewhere.
This range as might be expected includes some plots that are stronger than others, but the acting and the writing make this show a series of compelling character sketches. These allow viewers into the characters’ lives and ask us to see from their perspectives, and to consider moral questions that could appear in different ways in our everyday lives.
These characters’ often inspiring answers revolve around the search for dignity despite circumstances. An inmate (Tamara Lawrence) who has been sentenced to life for killing her child for example confronts other prisoners and her own shame, and in so doing seeks and finds meaning in spite of her physical constraints.
She and the others in their choices find ways to live with dignity. In doing so, they repeatedly reaffirm the capacity to choose, and the ways such choices can make life meaningful, regardless of circumstances.
This insight is contextualized across all three seasons by the impact of community, and the ways that communities can complement and complicate these choices. None of these characters’ choices, or our own, can be made in isolation in other words, and must also respond to others’ choices and our individual circumstances.
The effect is an affirmation to viewers that those who confront fewer challenges and have more resources can only hope to do as well and to make meaning from our everyday experiences. They and we only have and need time, and the inclination, to do so.
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