“Say Nothing” Is a Gripping Drama of Political Disillusionment

In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour. Dolours and Marian Price (Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe, respectively), two teen-age sisters born and raised in Belfast, are confronted almost immediately with the clash of expectations versus reality. The pair are still novice militants when they decide to devise their own mission, entering a local bank sporting nuns’ habits and guns and announcing their intent to “liberate” funds on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. The heist doesn’t go smoothly. A stern-faced woman refuses to coöperate, calling the sisters’ disguises “sacrilege”; a visibly panicked Marian implores her to lie down, sweetening the request with a “pretty please.” In the end, the stunt nets the I.R.A. just thirty-eight quid, but the sisters are giddy. “We’re all anyone’s talking about right now,” Dolours declares. That, she believes, is “fucking priceless.”

For such a scrappy operation, image is everything. It’s difficult to deny the worthiness, even the romance, of the Republican cause: the Irish have been resisting English invasion, colonization, and exploitation for eight centuries. The Price siblings see themselves as part of that grand tradition, as did their parents before them. (In the pilot, the sisters’ father, Albert, regales his young daughters at the dinner table with tales of bomb-making and prison beatings.) By the early nineteen-seventies, when the series begins, the movement had splintered, with some taking up arms to secure Northern Ireland’s independence from British rule. “Say Nothing” understands—and often captures—the excitement and allure of this fight. But the show is ultimately preoccupied with the way violence comes to weigh on its perpetrators, however noble their aims, and with the gulf between what the I.R.A. should’ve been and what it actually was.

Created by Josh Zetumer, the nine-part drama is a deft adaptation of a nonfiction book of the same name, by my colleague Patrick Radden Keefe. Zetumer’s version of the story, which spans more than forty years, distills its essence while rearranging the plot into a highly episodic format. Each installment is built around a discrete event—a bid to rescue an ally, a hunt for a mole—that also contributes to the larger project, dramatizing the wounds inflicted in the name of the would-be revolution. In setting, subject matter, and theme, the series stands refreshingly apart from most other American programming, and its longitudinal account of political disillusionment makes it one of the year’s finest shows.

Dolours, a miniskirted redhead with a reputation as a flirt and a passion for the arts that she might have parlayed into a career, promptly establishes herself as “Say Nothing” ’s protagonist—another structural departure from the source material, which takes an ensemble approach to the history. As one commanding officer in the series says, almost reverently, “Dolours could have been anything she wanted.” But, even as she rises through the I.R.A.’s ranks and eventually becomes a cause célèbre, she remains defined by—and against—her sister. Dolours, the elder of the two, is the visionary whose finger falters when pressed against the trigger; Marian is the soldier who keeps her head down but seldom hesitates to shoot. Prestige TV is full of Peggy Olsons: lone young women who suffer cuts on their way through the glass ceiling, often without the balm of sororal support. “Say Nothing” feels distinct in part because Dolours and Marian can depend on each other as they take on roles previously unimagined for women within the I.R.A. There’s even a bittersweet poignancy in the way they comfort and push each other forward in a hunger strike after their capture by British forces, their weakening bodies only strengthening their bond.

By the time Dolours is released, she’s spent seven years of her life behind bars. At thirty, she has to figure out what she wants her adulthood to be. As children, she and her comrades had imagined they’d die by hanging or by firing squad for their subversive activities; getting older didn’t occur to her as a possibility. One of the greater surprises of Keefe’s book, at least to this reader, was the callowness of the organization’s rank and file. The mission that cements Dolours’s place within the pantheon of the I.R.A. is carried out by a ragtag team mostly made up of teen-agers, at least one of whom gets falling-down drunk the night before. The rebels are no more polished in their bombing campaigns, which blow up plenty of unintended targets, including some of the bomb-makers themselves.

The efforts to bring discipline and order to the resistance are largely taken up by two leaders, the populist Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and the philosophical Gerry Adams (Josh Finan). The duo constitute a brotherhood that, in contrast to the Price sisters’ relationship, fractures irreparably over time, and that deterioration forms the backdrop for some of the series’ most engaging debates. Like Dolours, Brendan allows himself to have a heart, as when he discovers two spies who have betrayed him—one a friend, the other a seventeen-year-old boy from the neighborhood—and flips them into counterspies in a desperate bid to save them from certain execution. For Gerry, there’s only the pursuit of the bigger picture, no matter the collateral damage—a world view that he pays for years later, when the fate of a widowed mother of ten named Jean McConville, who was disappeared by paramilitaries, becomes a black mark against the movement. (At the end of each episode, a title card notes that the real-life Gerry Adams denies ever having been a member of the I.R.A.)

Throughout the series, the sisters’ youthful exploits are intercut with testimony from I.R.A. fighters who, in the early two-thousands, opened up to a historian on the condition that their interviews—a sort of secular confession—wouldn’t be released until after their deaths. A middle-aged Dolours (played by Maxine Peake) is among them. Such time jumps, now commonplace in television, can come at the expense of real character development. But the ones in “Say Nothing” prove striking, as time softens some members, like Dolours; hardens others, like Marian; and utterly transforms the likes of Gerry, who leaves the underground to join the British Parliament. (The decision, while devastating to the movement he renounced, may have been prescient: Sinn Féin, the party he led until 2018, is now the dominant power in Northern Ireland.) The adaptation somehow makes wild twists in the post-prison life of the actual Dolours Price, such as her marriage to an Oscar-nominated actor, feel organic. If this final act doesn’t quite succeed in conveying the instability of her later years, it at least offers a wonderful showcase for Peake, a perennially underrated character actor who makes the most of a role worthy of her range.

Zetumer’s attempt to pack in as many historical details as possible results in occasionally exposition-heavy dialogue, and reduces some important facts to brief asides—not least the reality that many Irish people disapproved of the paramilitary’s tactics. The series’ emphasis on the extreme loyalty of Catholic Belfasters—and its tendency toward cinematic flourishes—can create the opposite impression: in one memorable sequence, a fleeing Brendan crashes through the window of another man’s home, and knows exactly where in the living room he can find a hidden gun to turn on his pursuers.

The show soon complicates both narratives. As the decades pass, the silence that kept so many members safe from British retribution turns oppressive, and the I.R.A.’s victims and volunteers alike find themselves unable to move on. Gerry is, as ever, aloof to the casualties, having long since internalized the message that “Peace doesn’t come without cost.” But “Say Nothing” allies itself more closely with those who are forced to bear that burden, and digs into the disquiet that it creates. Early on, Dolours is ashamed at having “choked” during a mission, failing to fire quickly enough to insure a clean escape for her crew. Brendan reassures her. “I trust the ones that hesitate,” he says simply, noting that their enemies are “all some mother’s son.” Then he explains, with equal calm, the conviction that will come to haunt him: “Sometimes people get in the way.” ♦