FX’s ‘Say Nothing’ Is a Moving, Empathetic Assessment of the Troubles: TV Review

variety.com:

Alison Herman TV Critic The 30-year conflict known as the Troubles is frequently cited as a useful, and potentially hopeful, analogy to the entrenched hostilities in Israel-Palestine.

That makes the FX limited series “Say Nothing,” a scripted adaptation of journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction account published in 2018, queasily well-timed.

More than a year into the latest war in the Middle East with no end in sight, “Say Nothing” is a tragic, empathetic, evenhanded study in a similarly self-perpetuating cycle of violence from recent history — and the trade-offs required to bring it to a close.

Created by Joshua Zetumer (“Patriots Day”), the nine-episode “Say Nothing” is largely faithful to Keefe’s reporting, which used the disappearance and murder of single mother Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) to examine the Troubles’ human cost in Northern Ireland, a territory once bitterly contested between members of the Irish Republican Army and English authorities allied with the area’s Protestant majority. (Catholics were a persecuted minority within Northern Ireland subject to widespread discrimination, while Protestants felt threatened by the prospect of unification, which could put them in the same position.) But because McConville is absent from the story and her 10 children were still young at the time, the active drivers of the narrative and de facto protagonists of “Say Nothing” are the IRA fighters themselves, particularly real-life figures Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew).