“Say Nothing” is a poignant drama about political disillusionment

In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has — at least at first — an air of glamour. Dolours and Marian Price (Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe respectively), two teenage sisters born and raised in Belfast, are almost immediately confronted with the clash of expectations against reality. The pair are still fledgling militants when they decide to devise their own mission, entering a local bank wearing nuns’ habits and weapons and announcing their intention to “free” funds on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. The robbery does not go smoothly. A stern-faced woman refuses to cooperate, calling the sisters’ disguises “sacrilegious”; a visibly panicked Marian pleads with her to lie down, sweetening the request with a “nice thank you.” In the end, the stunt gives IRA only £38, but the sisters are giddy. “We’re all somebody’s talking about right now,” declares Dolours. Toshe believes, is “fucking priceless.”

For such a scrappy operation, image is everything. It is hard to deny the dignity, even the romance, of the republican cause: the Irish have resisted English invasion, colonization and exploitation for eight centuries. The Price siblings see themselves as part of the great tradition, like their parents before them. (In the pilot, the sisters’ father, Albert, regales his young daughters at the dinner table with tales of bomb-making and prison beatings.) In the early 1970s, when the series begins, the movement was fractured, with some taking up arms to secure Northern Ireland’s independence from British rule. “Say Nothing” understands – and often captures – the excitement and allure of this struggle. But the series is ultimately concerned with the way violence comes to weigh on its perpetrators, no matter how noble their aims, and with the gulf between what the IRA should have been and what it actually was.

Created by Josh Zetumer, the nine-part drama is a deft adaptation of a nonfiction book of the same name by my colleague Patrick Radden Keefe. Spanning more than forty years, Zetumer’s version of the story distills its essence while rearranging the plot into a highly episodic format. Each installment is built around a discrete event—an attempt to save an ally, a hunt for a mole—that also contributes to the larger project, dramatizing the wounds inflicted in the name of the coming revolution. In setting, subject and theme, the series stands out refreshingly from most other American programs, and its longitudinal account of political disillusionment makes it one of the finest shows of the year.

Dolours, a red-haired miniskirt with a reputation as a flirt and a passion for art that she could have parlayed into a career, immediately establishes herself as “Say Nothing’s” protagonist — another structural departure from the source material, which takes an ensemble approach to the story. As one commanding officer in the series almost reverently says, “Dolours could have been anything she wanted.” But even as she rises through the ranks of the IRA and eventually becomes a cause célèbre, she remains defined by – and against – her sister. Dolours, the older of the two, is the visionary whose finger falters as it presses against the trigger; Marian is the soldier who keeps his head down but rarely hesitates to shoot. Prestige TV is full of Peggy Olsons: single young women who cut their way through the glass ceiling, often without the balm of sororal support. “Say Nothing” feels separate in part because Dolours and Marian can trust each other as they take on roles previously unthinkable for women in the IRA. There’s even a bittersweet poignancy in the way they comfort and push each other forward on a hunger strike after their capture by British forces, their weakening bodies only strengthening their bond.

By the time Dolours is released, she has spent seven years of her life behind bars. At thirty, she has to figure out what she wants her adult life to be. As children, she and her companions had imagined that they would die by hanging or by shooting for their subversive activities; getting older didn’t occur to her as an option. One of the biggest surprises in Keefe’s book, at least for this reader, was that the organization’s rank and file were boring. The mission that cements Dolours’ place in the IRA pantheon is carried out by a ragtag team of mostly teenagers, at least one of whom gets drunk the night before. The insurgents are no more polished in their bombing campaigns, blowing up plenty of unintended targets, including some of the bombers themselves.

The effort to bring discipline and order to the resistance is largely taken up by two leaders, the populist Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and the philosophical Gerry Adams (Josh Finan). The duo form a brotherhood that, unlike the Price sisters’ relationship, breaks down irreparably over time, and that deterioration forms the backdrop for some of the series’ most engaging debates. Like Dolours, Brendan allows himself to have a heart, as when he discovers two spies who have betrayed him—one a friend, the other a seventeen-year-old neighborhood boy—and turns them into counterspies in a desperate attempt to save those from certain execution. For Gerry, there is only the pursuit of the bigger picture, regardless of the collateral damage – a worldview that he pays for years later, when the fate of a widowed mother of ten named Jean McConville, who was disappeared by paramilitaries, becomes a black mark against the movement. (At the end of each episode, a title card notes that the real Gerry Adams denies ever having been a member of the IRA)

Throughout the series, the sisters’ youthful exploits are punctuated with the testimony of IRA fighters who, in the early two thousand, opened up to a historian on the condition that their interviews – a kind of mundane confession – would only be released after 5 p.m. their death. A middle-aged Dolours (played by Maxine Peake) is among them. Such time jumps, which are now commonplace in television, can come at the expense of real character development. But those in “Say Nothing” prove striking as time softens some members, like Dolours; hardens others, like Marian; and completely transforms people like Gerry, who leaves the underground to join the British Parliament. (The decision, while devastating to the movement he renounced, may have been prescient: Sinn Féin, the party he led until 2018, is now the dominant force in Northern Ireland.) Adaptation somehow makes wild turns in life after prison. the actual Dolours Price, such as her marriage to an Oscar-nominated actor, feels organic. If this final act doesn’t quite succeed in conveying the instability of her later years, it at least offers a wonderful showcase for Peake, a perennially underrated character actor who makes the most of a role worthy of her range.

Zetumer’s attempt to pack in as much historical detail as possible results in occasional exposition-heavy dialogue and reduces some important facts to brief asides—not least the reality that many Irish disapproved of the paramilitary’s tactics. The show’s emphasis on the extreme loyalty of Catholic Belfasters – and its penchant for cinematic flourishes – can create the opposite impression: in one memorable sequence, a fleeing Brendan crashes through the window of another man’s home, knowing exactly where in the living room. he can find a hidden gun to turn on his pursuers.

The show soon complicates both narratives. As the decades pass, the silence that kept so many members safe from British retaliation becomes oppressive, and IRA victims and volunteers alike find themselves unable to come forward. Gerry, as always, is aloof from the victims, having long since internalized the message that “Peace does not come without a cost.” But “Say Nothing” allies itself more closely with those forced to bear that burden, digging into the turmoil it creates. Early on, Dolours is ashamed of having “choked” during a mission and fails to fire fast enough to ensure a clean escape for her crew. Brendan reassures her. “I trust those who hesitate,” he says simply, noting that their enemies are “all some mother’s son.” Then he just as calmly explains the conviction that will come to haunt him: “Sometimes people get in the way.”