Time (Season 2)

Available on BBC iPlayer

The first season of Jimmy McGovern’s crime drama, which starred Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, was one of the standout shows of 2021, so you could forgive its successor for buckling under the weight of expectation. Nonetheless, the sophomore outing of Time is a similarly impactful affair, with McGovern and co-writer Helen Black turning their attention to the equally flawed institutions that are the UK’s women-only prisons.

Starring Bella Ramsey, Jodie Whittaker, and Tamara Lawrance, this two-episode series is centred on the plight of three unrelated women who are locked up on the same day; one is a heroin addict who soon discovers she is pregnant, the other a struggling single mother who is jailed for failing to pay her electricity bills, and the latter a lifer whose back story is shrouded in mystery.

Although each role is finely performed, a criticism of this instalment of Time would be that its modest runtime makes it difficult for each arc to be satisfactorily resolved. For example, Whittaker steals the show because we witness the painful degradation of her character as she is kept away from her three children, while Lawrance’s performance, through no fault of her own, eventually feels overshadowed due to the lack of resolution afforded to it by Black and McGovern.

That is a minor quibble though as, on the whole, Time successfully adheres to its creator’s modus operandi by shining a light on the misfortunes bestowed on people (usually those of a working class background) by systems that are not fit for purpose.