TV Pick of the Week: Maryland - Review by Yvette Huddleston

Best plays older sister Rosaline who went to London, forged a successful career, remained resolutely single and has never looked back while Jones is Becca who married young, stayed near their parents and is now in the midst of working and running a household, while coping with the demands of two teenage daughters and a domestically inept husband.

It opens with the discovery of the body of a woman, found on a beach by a man who appears to know her. It turns out the woman is Becca and Rosaline’s mother Mary and she died while on the Isle of Man, which is news to her daughters and her husband Richard (George Costigan) who all thought she was on holiday in a caravan in Wales with her friend Maureen. The sisters head over to the Isle of Man to identify the body, begin the process of repatriation and to find out more about what their mother was doing in a place that, as far as they knew, she had no connection with.

What they find out is that Mary was actually adopted and she had traced her birth mother to the Isle of Man, had managed to get to know her and spend some time with her and eventually inherited a well-appointed house from her; that she had been having a relationship with erudite academic Paul (Hugh Quarshie), a man a million miles away from their taciturn father, and had developed a close friendship with forthright American neighbour Cathy (Stockard Channing).

As further revelations about their mother shake the sisters’ worlds, their individual strengths and vulnerabilities are brought to the fore in finely wrought, beautifully observed writing from O’Connor. The shock of discovering that their mother had kept so much from them and was effectively leading a double life for years stirs up long-buried tensions and resentments. The two women are forced to confront the fissures in their relationship and revisit unsettling events in their childhood that are at the root of their difficulties. Though they have drifted apart over the years, there is still a strong bond between them and fierce sibling love – it’s a delicate dynamic that Jones and Best play absolutely to perfection. The narrative unfolds slowly, and it’s all the better for it. A bit of a gem.