You’d think someone smart enough to become a lawyer would be smart enough to realize it’s rarely a good idea to go to the Mob for money to bail yourself or your friends and family out of a tight spot.
Or to expect that once you’d broken bread with the Mob, you would, at the end of the transaction, shake hands and amicably go your separate ways.
The ripple effect of ignoring those somewhat basic rules gives us the second season of Keeping Faith, a six-part British series that arrives Friday (Aug 30) in the U.S. on Acorn.
Eve Myles (top) plays the title character, Faith Howells. She’s not the one who cut the deal with the Mob, just the one who has to deal with the seemingly never-ending and rarely benign consequences.
The screw-up is her husband Evan (Bradley Freegard), and like most decent folks who engage with criminals, he did it for what he considered an urgent reason.
Evan and Faith, also a lawyer, work for the family law firm run by Evan’s father, Tom (Aneirin Hughes), in a picturesque corner of Wales.
Like most family-run operations, it has its share of quirky characters. Most seem competent and serious, notably fellow lawyer Cerys Jones (Hannah Daniel).
In spite of all their good-faith efforts, the firm ran into serious financial difficulty. In fact, it went bankrupt, a fact Evan somehow managed to hide from Faith when she was on maternity leave after having their third child.
Tapping the Mob became Evan’s desperate long-shot strategy to keep the firm in business. Evan was apparently not very good at Mob dealings, however, since he vanished and was presumed dead.
So dead that Faith became a suspect in his murder.
All that unfolded in the first season, and understanding the second season requires a brief summary of how that played out.
But any viewer who is new to Keeping Faith might not want to know that information just yet (sorry).
As much of a task as this might seem, viewers who think they might be interested in Keeping Faith should not start with Season 2. They should go back and first watch Season 1.
That’s not an onerous chore. Besides the drama between Faith and Evan, there is considerable secondary deception, some romance, and interesting side dramas on matters like the way stress from Mob interaction and police investigations can impact parenting.
On a purely practical level, jumping right into Season 2 will raise a number of questions, the majority of which have been answered, albeit sometimes cryptically, in the first season.
What can safely be said about Season 2 is that Myles does a terrific job of conveying Faith’s frustration and exasperation, which inevitably underlie all the strategic decisions she must make to counter the multiple challenges barreling toward her at all times. Nor is she immune from making occasional bad decisions herself.
Keeping Faith has been compared to Big Little Lies, the resemblance stemming primarily from the difficulty of preventing truth, or some part of the truth, from messing up a carefully crafted canvas of untruths.
Keeping Faith is less soapy than Big Little Lies, however, and more gritty. It will also make you less likely than ever to take out a loan from the Mob.