Between 2001 and 2006, researchers at Boston College collected recordings from former paramilitary members of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast as part of an oral history archive meant to capture personal accounts of the Troubles. With promises of strict confidentiality — sealed until the participants’ deaths — these interviews allowed individuals to speak openly about violent events that defined a turbulent era in Northern Ireland’s history. Yet this assurance of secrecy unraveled when British authorities, pursuing unresolved cases surrounding the IRA, such as the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, legally compelled Boston College to release portions of the tapes. The stories contained within those tapes form the basis of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, which in turn inspired the new FX miniseries, Say Nothing.
Keefe’s book, an excellent work of narrative nonfiction, details the Troubles in Northern Ireland beginning in 1969. The book centers around the aforementioned 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was abducted from her Belfast home by members of the Provisional IRA. Accused of being an informant for the British, McConville was taken from her children in a chilling act that became one of the conflict’s most infamous unsolved cases. Keefe, who spent four years and conducted more than one hundred interviews in preparation for the book, provides a meticulous account of the IRA’s inner workings, exploring how young radicals were drawn to the fight and revealing the deeply entrenched tensions that divided communities.
Which is to say, Say Nothing the book provided plenty of source material for Say Nothing the show. The miniseries centers on the perspective of a key IRA member, Dolours Price (played by Lola Petticrew in her youth and Maxine Peake in her middle age), and alternates between her later years, giving her interview for the Belfast Project, and the events that took place during the years of the Troubles. Say Nothing carefully examines her journey from her early induction into the IRA, her participation in violent operations, and the personal sacrifices that ultimately shaped her life.
But while Say Nothing covers undeniably fascinating history, capturing the unique turmoil and moral complexity of the Troubles, it ultimately struggles to match the depth and immediacy of its source material. Naturally, as the art of adaptation goes, nine 40-minute episodes can never reach the depth of 460-plus-page book, and the stories showrunner Joshua Zetumer chooses to showcase are selective by necessity. These choices, however, often result in a overall presentation that feels palpably condensed, as if key layers of context and nuance are sacrificed in favor of high-stakes drama and overt narrative legibility. And while any adaptation of the broad tapestry of interconnected lives and ideologies that Keefe meticulously constructs in his book of course requires an entry point and conceptual throughline, Price’s journey can at times feel like it overshadows all, leaving the show feeling more limited in scope and a more grandly rewarding project frustratingly out of reach.
Say Nothing does occasionally capture the gripping intensity of the book, especially in its depiction of pivotal IRA missions, but the series’ overall pacing and structure sometimes undercut the emotional impact elicited in the source material. What emerges is story that, while intriguing, struggles to balance the personal stakes of its central characters with the larger political and historical forces at play, leaving viewers held at a sense of distance from the events’ true weight. So while the miniseries offers a functionally dramatic look at the Troubles on an episode by episode basis, it lacks the layered storytelling and careful, personal insight that made the book so unforgettable, opting instead for easily digestible viewing primed for binge-watching rather than a more considerate and substantial project.
CREATOR: Josh Zetumer; CAST: Lola Petticrew, Maxine Peake, Anthony Boyle, Hazel Doupe, Josh Finan; DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu; STREAMING: November 14;
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