Showtime
“Ripped from the headlines” means something very different in the U.K. The BBC is a public-service broadcaster, and the kind of true-crime stories that often get a salacious makeover in the U.S. are, on the other side of the pond, more likely to be dramatized with a dogged realism that points, journalistically and dutifully, to wider social contexts. The Woman in the Wall may sound like the title of a novel you picked up at an airport bookstore in 2018—and indeed, it concerns a woman (played by Ruth Wilson) trying to both solve a mystery and prove her sanity. But beneath its thriller trappings, this British import—a joint production of the Beeb and Showtime—retells a front-page story of tragic, systemic injustice.
The series (streaming Jan. 19 on Paramount+ with Showtime and airing on Showtime starting Jan. 21) is set in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. It’s 2015, shortly after the publication of the long-anticipated Irish government report on the infamous Magdalene Laundries, and shortly before the formation of a new commission on mother-and-baby homes, likewise run by the Catholic Church and supported by the state, sparked by revelations of babies born out of wedlock buried in mass graves or ripped out of their mothers’ arms and sold to adoptive parents. The reckoning to which the show builds is still raw. (The final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation was only released in 2021).
Though The Woman in the Wall’s visual style is largely functional, it opens with one of its more striking images: a woman in a white nightgown, asleep in the middle of a country road, like a ghost haunting the pasturelands. In fact it’s the woman herself who’s haunted. Lorna Brady (Wilson) is prone to sleepwalking, a vestige of her confinement in a mother-and-baby home as a pregnant teen in the 1980s, during the last years when such places were widespread. Lorna is something like the local eccentric, prone to violent outbursts and impulsive behavior when in her fugue state, and ill temper and depression when awake, even alienating the fellow members of a survivors’ group.