Stream It Or Skip It: ‘MaryLand’ On PBS, Where Two Sisters Discover Their Mother’s Secret Life After She Dies

How would you feel if you discovered that one of your parents was leading a secret second life, and the only way you find out is that the parent dies in a completely unexpected place? A new British drama airing in the U.S. on PBS’ Masterpiece gives us such a scenario.

MARYLAND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shoreline scenes. A man stops in his tracks on the beach when he sees someone he knows lying unconscious in the sand. He runs to her and discovers that she has no pulse.

The Gist: During a busy morning before she goes to work, Becca (Suranne Jones) from a strange number; it’s word from the authorities that the woman who was found dead on the beach was her mother, but she needs to go to the Isle of Man to identify her. Becca is distraught but confused; she thought her mom was visiting Wales. Why was she on the Isle on Man?

Becca calls her sister Rosaline (Eve Best), who is in a doctor’s office having her breasts examined after what we believe was a mastectomy. She takes the news less emotionally but with just as much distress. Given that Rosaline is in London, 200 miles away, Becca reluctantly has to go tell their father Richard (George Costigan). The sisters decide to go together to the Isle of Man to identify the body.

Things between Becca and Rosaline haven’t been great since Rosaline’s illness, and Rosaline hasn’t seen much of her mother since then, either. Becca, though, has seen her mother every couple of weeks and talked to her on the phone. So when the sisters find out that their mother was discovered by a “friend who was meeting her for a walk,” they have no idea who this person is. They’ll need to stay in town while the autopsy is performed, before their mom can be released back to them. They get the number of Pete (Hugh Quarshie), the friend who found her.

The next day, the sisters go to the address where she was staying. They’re shocked when it’s a regular house, not a B&B. When Rosaline finds a spare key, and lets herself in. The sisters are shocked to see the walls lined with pictures of the two of them, indicating that their mother lived there.

When Pete doesn’t answer his phone after a few calls, Rosaline finds a phone book with his address in it. She and Becca meet him in his driveway; Rosaline peppers him with pointed questions, like if they were having an affair. At a certain point, he asks them to leave because he can’t deal with these questions about his friend, even though they’re coming from the daughters she’s always talked about.

It’s left to Cathy (Stockard Channing), an American who makes her living selling weed and other drugs to senior citizens on the island, to come and explain what their mother was doing on the Isle of Man. Turns out she was adopted as a baby, and she found her biological mother on the Isle of Man eight years prior; the house she was living in was inherited from that biological mother, whom she got to know in the woman’s final years.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? MaryLand, created by Jones and Anne-Marie O’Connor, has a bit of a feeling of Bad Sisters, though it’s less dark than that show.

Our Take: MaryLand is a limited series of three 45-minute episodes, so in essence, it’s structured more like a 135-minute feature film, telling a complete story which has more or less two intertwined parts. As Becca and Rosaline unwind this secret life that their mother had, they try to resolve the frost that developed between each other in recent years. When the series concentrates on the dynamic between Jones’ and Best’s characters, that’s when it shines.

A scene where Becca tries to break the tension between her and Rosaline by doing some wall walking like they did when they were kids leads straight into an argument about how much Rosaline resented both Becca and their mom for something that happened as they cared for her when she was sick. Roasline says, “you two and your bloomin’ cult of caring,” referring to that time. We think the roots of Rosaline’s resentment is how much more in common Becca had with their mom than she did, and it all came out during the time they cared for her.

There are some deep emotions being explored here, and the wounds are exposed every time they learn something about their mother that indicates she was lying to both of them and their father. Of course, wounds can be healed, and that’s what we’re thinking is at the center of this series. The sisters will rediscover their bond as they figure out what their mother was looking for. They may never get to the bottom of why their mother didn’t want to say anything about the last eight years of her life to anyone, but the journey to finding out as much as they can will bring the sisters together.

The side stories have the potential to be interesting, but we get the feeling they won’t get enough time to make any impact. There’s Rosaline’s snarky banter with a taxi driver named Jacob (Dean Lennox Kelly). Cathy is looking for a substance that seems to be really important for her to find. Becca’s husband Jim (Andrew Knott) seems to be cracking as he deals with his father-in-law Richard at the same time his younger daughter Molly (Yasmin Davies) has been having problems at school. The three short episodes just don’t seem to give enough real estate to all these stories, but we’ll just have to wait and see on that.

Sex and Skin: Oh, there is an indication that Rosaline is having an affair with her much younger — boss? subordinate? – Nick (Ed White), but we don’t know if that storyline is going anywhere.

Parting Shot: Becca and Rosaline spend the night in the house their mom lived in on the island, both of them sleeping in the bed she may have shared with another man (they found men’s pajamas in the room).

Sleeper Star: Rhiannon Clements, who plays Becca’s older daughter Lauren, who seems to be an emotional rock to the other three members of her family.

Most Pilot-y Line: Rosaline seems to have a knack for telling people her mother died at a time that makes the person hearing the news feel like shit for their behavior immediately before she said it. She did it with Nick as he tried to kiss her, and she did it to Jacob as he told the sisters to say hello to the fairies as he drove them across the bridge onto the island.

Our Call: STREAM IT. When MaryLand concentrates on Becca and Rosaline re-bonding while seeking answers about their mother, the series works the best, thanks the the performances from Jones and Best. The rest of the stories surrounding the sisters feel like filler that won’t really have much to do with the general direction of the series.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.