Keeping Faith, Series 2, BBC One review - family misfortunes

It was a year ago that BBC One scored a smash hit with the first series of Keeping Faith, but as series two opens 18 months have passed since Faith Howells’s husband Evan (Bradley Freegard) disappeared and triggered a traumatic chain reaction of events.

All will be revealed across these six new episodes (which is a bit of a swizz, since series one had eight), but this opener set a cracking pace, immediately plunging us back into the sense of menace and unease which had so powerfully informed the previous series. Evan is in prison for his misdeeds, while Faith is battling to clothe, feed and educate her three children while continuing to take up the legal cudgels on behalf of her clients.

Eve Myles’s performance as Faith is a continuing marvel of stressed-out multitasking, as she hurtles between domestic chaos, shopping and school runs and studying legal briefs and staying sharp enough for hand-to-hand combat in court. It’s an impossible ask, despite all the help she gets from gal-pal Lisa (an effervescent Catherine Ayers) and the loyal Arthur (Alex Harries), who Faith rescued from his vagabond life, but it makes a great engine for the drama.How her disgust and horror about Evan’s secret life will pan out we wait to see, but for the moment Faith is preoccupied with case of farmer’s wife Madlen Vaughan (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), on trial for the murder of her husband Dyfan. Big-hearted Faith is convinced this pitiable, downtrodden woman must be innocent, but the police and the prosecution are licking their lips at what they regard as an inevitable conviction.

What makes Keeping Faith so addictively watchable is the way writer and creator Matthew Hall successfully meshes the mundane details of everyday life with bigger issues of crime, justice, integrity and honesty (or lack of it), so it has the unpolished energy of a soap as well as the grander designs of more self-consciously weighty dramas like Line of Duty or The Missing. The clincher is its firm grounding in Carmarthenshire, from the locations and exquisite scenery to the unselfconscious Welshness of the dialogue and characterisations. It brings a sense of identity and a coherent framework it’s difficult to achieve if the location is just some huge, anonymous city.

It’s a story about the nature and behaviour of families too. The Howells dynasty is a labyrinth of historical entanglements and disappointments, and previously unseen connections keep popping up to add complications to the narrative. The way Faith has to contend with not just her children and her fatally flawed husband but also her difficult, demanding parents-in-law is a mini-saga in its own right. Meanwhile the toxic tentacles of the ruthless Reardon crime family have snaked under Faith’s front door and are threatening to throttle her, as she strives desperately to find a way to rid herself of the vile attentions of Gael Reardon (a shiver-inducing Anastasia Hille, pictured above). Will the reassuringly solid, though undeniably criminal, Steve Baldini (Mark Lewis Jones) become her unlikely saviour? All episodes are up now on iPlayer.

• More TV reviews on theartsdesk