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Hello again and Happy St. Patrick's Day. If you tipple, don't topple. That's my only Irish advice to you today.

After a week in Ireland, I can report that Irish TV isn't exactly brimming with gripping, original content. Film is thriving and theatre is remarkably strong, but there are few Irish-made television series that transcend the very ordinary.

What does work, mind you, is strikingly anchored in contemporary Ireland. The crime show Love/Hate, made by public broadcaster RTE, is easily the most provocative, terse and illustrative drama in years. Set in the Dublin criminal underworld – an arena so violent it often makes international headlines – it looks and feels like the streets on which it is set. While the storylines are forceful depictions of life inside violent gangs, it is the emphatic anchoring of the series in recognizable Dublin that really matters.

It's a matter of location, location, location. And that's true too of the best of recent British drama. The insistence on place is crucial. That and the trick of upending the usual narrative.

The second season of Happy Valley (now streaming on Netflix) is a stunner and that's in part because it uses its locale – the streets, the houses, the pokey little kitchens and the weather of a valley in West Yorkshire – to frame everything. It's a bloody ordinary place and often depressingly so. Yet the series never lets go of the humdrum setting.

In the first season, which deservedly won many awards, we were introduced to the central character, Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire). Although it was Catherine who introduced herself in the opening minutes, as she tried to deal with a possibly dangerous nutbar: "I'm Catherine. I'm 47, divorced and live with my sister, who's a recovering heroin addict. I've got two grown-up children – one dead, one who doesn't speak to me – and a grandson. Why doesn't my son speak to me? It's complicated. Now, let's talk about you."

The plot was mainly about Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), who had, it turned out, raped Catherine's daughter and was therefore the father of Catherine's grandson. His murderous acts of revenge were all the more chilling for the banality of his grievances.

In this season, the central storyline is pushed forward, but with additional plot lines and new characters.

However, it is still the remarkably plausible figure of Catherine who carries it. First, she has to deal with a case of sheep-rustling. Yep, in this sad, damp place, local kids steal sheep and drug them. Catherine's dealing with terminating several injured sheep is one of those scenes of baroque black comedy that establish the central theme – people will, inevitably, behave very stupidly.

There are flashes of droll comedy, too, bits of dialogue that seem to float by, but are brutally sharp. When Catherine declines to arrest someone, she explains, off the cuff, that she knows she is failing to "help Mr. Cameron massage his crime figures."

And there is a sly comic grimness that can be disconcerting. A central issue in the plot arrives via Catherine's sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), who is sitting on the hospital bed of a woman dying of cancer. She's trying to think of something to say. "Our Catherine had an interesting day at work," she starts. And the others murmur, "Really?" And Clare continues, "Yeah. Found a dead body." The dead body is in fact that of Tommy Lee Royce's mother.

The relationship between Catherine and her sister is at the core of Happy Valley. But, throughout, the series is female-centric even as a male criminal is the main figure representing evil. Many of the cops in Catherine's quad are women. It is their banter and scenes of emotional connection that are truly memorable and amount to a gender-reversal reboot of conventional crime drama.

The theme of female revenge is prominent, too. Tommy Lee Royce, though proved to be utterly malevolent, has a new sidekick, a woman played with unnerving, jittery intensity by Shirley Henderson. And one of Catherine's colleagues, Detective Sergeant John Wadsworth (Kevin Doyle, who played Molesley on Downton Abbey), has been having an affair. His mistress acts with very male cunning to teach him a lesson.

Here's the thing about Happy Valley: This second season is actually stronger than the first. (It's written again by Sally Wainwright, who also directs four episodes.) There's more subtlety in its six parts and fewer flourishes to distract from the engine of the narrative. Lancashire is even more formidable in the lead role.

But it's location, location, location that holds everything together – the rain, the mist, the leafless trees add immeasurably to what is already a stunningly grim, entertaining drama.

Editor's note: An earlier digital version of this story incorrectly stated in the headline that Happy Valley is an Irish drama This version has been corrected.

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