The First Images from 'Happy Valley' Season 3 Are Bloody Good

It's been almost a decade since the BBC originally commissioned Happy Valley in November 2012. Created and written by Sally Wainwright, the police procedural series was as much a cat-and-mouse game between PC Catherine Cawood and the man who'd raped her daughter, Becky, and driven her to suicide, Tommy Lee Royce. Played by Sarah Lancashire (Last Tango in Halifax) and James Norton (Grantchester), with Siobhan Finneran (Downton Abbey) as Cawood's sister, Clare, the 2014 series combined the stars of three of the most popular PBS shows in the U.S. at the time.

The second season, which arrived in 2016, added Kevin Doyle (also of Downton fame) and Matthew Lewis, who had recently gone from Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter to smokin' hot. But though there was talk of a third set of episodes, it took until the pandemic for Wainwright to finally get around to it. Initially announced in 2021, the third season is now partly backed by AMC Networks, owner of AMC+ and Acorn TV, who also picked up the rights to stream the first two seasons ahead of the announcement. The third season will stream on both platforms, marking one of the first times AMC+ and Acorn TV have crossed over their programming in the U.S.