A Woman of Substance

Our heroine’s journey from Catherine Cookson territory to a shag-piled Manhattan skyscraper is treated with a surprising amount of sincerity.

The neurotic bed-hopping (which continues even after one of the trio is dead) was akin to torture. Thankfully, despite the longueurs, AWOS gets where it needs to go.

A Woman of Substance still works brilliantly as a nostalgia piece – a perfect homage to the age of excess and television that drowned you in plot and let someone else worry about the rest. Think of it as Dallas in Yorkshire. Three-star television but four-star nonsense and delight.

This drama can be a bit “tell” not “show”. It is also, obviously, really silly. But it does have the nous to lean into the absurdity with thunderous string music, fortissimo piano and sweeping shots of the lovely Yorkshire landscape. If anything, the parallel timeline is even more lush.

Reynolds is a force to be reckoned with here – bringing humour, light, hope and heartbreak to every episode. With less screen time than Reynolds, it's hard for Blethyn to embody all of that to a similar degree but in the final moments of the series, she does come into her own a bit more as the story takes some soapy turns.