TV Review: The Way is worth a watch once slow start gives way to anarchy

Steffan Rhodi plays Geoff, a shop-steward in the giant local steel-works.

The Way (BBC One and BBC iPlayer) is sluggish at the start. The three-part drama is co-created by Adam Curtis, who makes these brilliant immersive long-form documentaries about things like the downfall of communism. 

It’s directed by actor Michael Sheen who brings power and personality to everything he touches.

So this story about a strike at the steel-works in his native Port Talbot in Wales held a lot of promise. 

The problem for most of the first episode is that it feels like a polemic against modern capitalism. 

That’s fine if you’re against that sort of thing. 

But it means the actors are just parroting down-with-the-one-per-cent lines and person-splaining the roots of inequality in our society, rather than getting on with being messy human beings.

That’s a shame because the human-level story is good. 

It revolves around the Driscoll family where the parents, Dee and Geoff are finalising their divorce. 

'By the start of episode two, it’s gone full-on dystopian.'

Their daughter Thea is a cop, who has arrested her brother Owen for drug dealing. 

Geoff is a shop steward in the giant local steel-works, familiar to anyone who took the Supabus from Cork to London in the 1980s. 

He’s pragmatic and weak, trying to cosy up to the foreign investors who now own the plant when everyone around him wants to fight to protect the jobs.

But for much of the opening 45 minutes, we’re stuck watching set-piece speeches about Margaret Thatcher and the effect of the Miner’s Strike on working class communities. 

And then it kicks off. The workers go out on strike, against Geoff’s wishes, following a rousing speech by his ex-wife Dee. 

It’s cheesy but it works thanks to good acting all round. 

The result is a massive riot, joined by anti-immigrant protesters, Welsh separatists, skin-head British nationalists, and everyone is fighting everyone, with cop Thea in the middle.

By the start of episode two, it’s gone full-on dystopian. 

Owen wakes up in an isolation camp set up by private security contractors

Owen wakes up in an isolation camp set up by private security contractors, in images that make a clear nod to internment in Northern Ireland. 

The town is under curfew, Covid-style. Daftly, Geoff is wandering around with a sword that was discovered in the steel plants.

But it works. I’m all in at this stage. They go all in on the anarchy and I won’t spoil it too much but the Driscolls end up together and on the run. 

The politics parroting is over and it’s enjoyable, even fun in parts, like when Geoff starts ‘seeing’ his dead father, played by Michael Sheen. 

It has what any drama needs now – I want to know what happens next. 

So will you if you push on through the slow start. Give it a watch.