Keeping Faith, Series 3, BBC One review - is the drama turning to melodrama?

After arriving with a bang in 2018, Keeping Faith (BBC One) disappointed many (though not all) of its fans with 2019’s second series. It’s had a bit of a breather before this third – and final – series, first seen in its Welsh version Un Bore Mercher on S4C last November. So, how is it shaping up?

While the ravishing Welsh scenery of Laugharne and Carmarthenshire is almost reason enough to watch the show, the story has moved on, with Faith Howells (Eve Myles) now running her own law firm, while still trying to work out divorce and child-custody arrangements with disgraced husband and ex-jailbird Evan (Bradley Freegard). Sadly, although Evan now sports a luxuriant dad-beard, it can’t disguise his weakness, fecklessness and petulance. He’s making a pig’s ear of working at his father’s law firm, and the more he keeps trying to insinuate himself back into Faith’s life, the more disgusted she becomes. Which is ironic, since they’re a married couple in real life.

Meanwhile Faith’s will-they-won’t-they relationship with Steve Baldini (Mark Lewis Jones, pictured below with Celia Imrie) continues to simmer gently. Where Evan is a sad specimen of manhood, Steve is a primitive hunter-gatherer, living in a rough-hewn shed in the woods where he repairs motorcycles and hacks up logs with an axe. Nonetheless, he’s a proud and protective father to his daughter Angie, and Faith is a sucker for his musky cave-man allure. “Their journey has been a wonderful one, and a painful one,” Jones commented in a pre-broadcast interview.

While Keeping Faith is always watchable and can boast numerous strong performances (Myles always brings her revved-up A-game, Hannah Daniel is superb as her brusque and capable legal partner Cerys Jones, and Aneirin Hughes gives a nicely-nuanced turn as Evan’s father Tom), its problem is that it has never managed to surpass the central mystery of the first series. The sudden disappearance of Evan left Faith struggling to keep her family and career together, and the inexplicable event gave the show an aura of tragedy and foreboding which exerted a powerful pull on viewers. Revelations of organised crime, murder and corruption cranked the pressure to boiling point.

Now, the show looks more like a conventional domestic drama with a side order of social concern. Aside from the Howells’ family issues, the central legal theme in this new series is the case of 14-year-old Osian (Keogh Kiernan). He has a brain tumour which will prove fatal, unless he has very hazardous surgery which is likely to leave him severely disabled. It’s an agonising dilemma to which there’s no easy answer, but Faith is rolling up her sleeves to do battle on behalf of Osian and his father’s right to decide to have the surgery. If she can’t persuade Judge Owens (a somewhat baleful Siân Phillips), she’s prepared to take the case to a higher authority.

Not that the criminal dimension has vanished altogether. Steve Baldini has found himself in hock to the unpleasant Rose Fairchild (Celia Imrie, struggling to play against type), who coerced him into carrying out a robbery which triggered unforeseen side-effects. Not only that, but it transpires that Rose and Faith have history stretching back to the day Faith was born. Is the drama going to turn into melodrama?

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