The Way is Michael Sheen’s TV directing debut, and it’s clearly a project that he’s extremely passionate about because it’s set in and filmed in and around his home town, the South Wales steelworks community of Port Talbot. Broadly, it deals with tough contemporary social issues and puts a potentially fascinating narrative twist on events that, whilst largely fictional, have sailed close to reality thanks to recent worrying newsworthy developments in the area. At least, that was the plan. The resulting drama, sadly, is something of a mess. It’s extraordinarily uneven tonally, its script requires its audience to make the most astonishing leaps of faith to even begin to invest in the largely caricatured characters and their frankly desperately unlikely plight, and it throws in woeful sub-Black Mirror/Years and Years ideas and then tosses in some vague Welsh mythology mumbo-jumbo for good measure.
Frustratingly, it all starts rather promisingly. The first episode has a gritty, semi-documentary feel to it as we meet the Driscolls, a working-class family struggling to survive and whose fairly peaceful life in Port Talbot is threatened when it becomes apparent that the Chinese owners of the (real-life) Port Talbot steelworks are planning to wind the facility down, causing mass unemployment and strife across the area. Trade union steward Geoff Driscoll (Steffan Rhodri) ties to keep the peace between the frustrated owners and volatile steelworker Glynn (Mark Lewis Jones) and a town meeting to discuss an approach to dealing with the situation falls apart when the flame from one of the furnaces that have burned for decades and become a symbol of the industry is turned off (in reality the actual flame was turned off years ago) and the workers begin a blockade of the steelworks and a series of ugly riots erupt throughout the town. So far, so good. But minutes into the second episode, disbelief becomes a little harder to suspend when the entire Driscoll family – Geoff’s estranged wife Dee (Mali Harries), his drug-dependant son Owen (It’s A Sin’s Callum Scott Howells), and his police officer daughter Thea (Sophie Melville) are turned into scapegoats and branded the ringleaders of the civil unrest tearing apart the town and spreading across Wales. The family and Owen’s Polish immigrant love interest, Anna (Maja Laskowska), decide to flee Wales and head for sanctuary in England with no real plan about what they’ll do when they get there or what the future might hold in store for them. Oh, and Geoff is haunted by visions of his late father, Denny (Michael Sheen), who took part in the 1984 miners’ strike but eventually took his own life.
To say that The Way falls apart in its second and third episodes would be, at the very least, an understatement. Part Two itself has a slightly surreal quality as the Driscolls flee the town – surreal to the extent that it’s hard to believe that what had started as a realistic, if stylised, modern drama literally torn from newspaper headlines has so quickly devolved into something so irrational and incredible. Wales, we’re told, is burning, and the Welsh are pariahs, the army rounding up civilians and taking them off to internment camps and with self-appointed militias blocking English villages so no “dirty, infected Welsh” can slip through. The Driscolls are left to trample through the countryside, and not only is Geoff conversing frequently with the ghost of his dead dad, but Owen is suffering withdrawal hallucinations. At one point, an abandoned teddy bear in a ditch starts to talk to him, and he suffers strange dreams of being submerged and wading through underwater ruins. To make matters even worse (and even more ridiculous), we’re told that there’s a mercenary called Hogwood (Luke Evans in a big hat) who has become known as ‘the Welsh Catcher’ as he has been contracted to hunt down Welsh people who have crossed to border into England. Part Three crumbles completely; after the Driscolls interrupt a magnificently ineptly staged ‘swingers’ party, they are given a shot at freedom thanks to a handy freemason who allows them to use his convenient canal boat so they can head to the coast where they can be smuggled across the Channel.
By the time the final scenes roll around, any residual investment in the characters has long since drained away, and the drama itself has become a stupid, badly realised dystopian farce. The Driscolls reach the coast and find ‘New Port Talbot’ being established in the sand dunes. Unfortunately, this consists of a handful of tin huts, six extras, and a cameo from a clearly-embarrassed Paul Rhys. The whole series fizzles out in a feeble ‘desperate refugees at sea’ sequence, and the farrago comes to a merciful end with two acts of dreary self-sacrifice.
It’s hard to pinpoint quite why and how The Way was allowed to hurtle off the rails so astonishingly after an intriguing first episode. Sheen was keen to create a drama asking why a normal family might go on the run from its own community, but it’s hard to imagine a storyline that brings that idea to the screen with less finesse than The Way. Clumsy attempts to evoke the atmosphere of the pandemic lockdowns are undermined by the idiocy of the unfurling narrative that gets bogged down in its second episode by tedious sub-soap opera family dramatics – “You’re not my real Dad?!” – and any attempts at social realism are completely lost in a sea of clichés, achingly stupid ideas and genuinely bad dialogue that betrays a strong and usually-distinguished cast… and let’s not even start on the ‘mysterious’ Red Monks. Part One has an edginess and an urgency, thanks to a few interesting directorial flourishes by Sheen, but the two remaining episodes are pretty much car crash TV. The Way is a massive misfire, a disastrously ill-considered piece of work that purports to celebrate Welsh culture and the Welsh community but only ends up demeaning it.
All three episodes of THE WAY are available on BBC iPlayer