Maryland review: Suranne Jones and Eve Best shine in this life-affirming drama which shuns the usual TV cliches

Oh dear, you think. Another murder mystery in which women are attacked by some random serial killer with a fetish – maybe this one dropped his ice cream back in the long hot summer of '76 and has been traumatised by the seaside ever since.

Or could we dare to hope for something different?

Happily, as it turns out, we could.

Yes, there is a death, and yes it is a woman, but there is no Mr Whippy serial killer here. Meanwhile, the only mystery is one we'd all recognise – what is life about, and why do we make such a mess of it?

Suranne Jones and Eve Best play sisters Becca and Rosaline, who have long settled into stereotypical sibling roles.

Becca is the dutiful, stay-at-home, caring sister, with the childhood sweetheart of a husband, the two lovely daughters and the granite-topped kitchen island.

Rosaline is the one who moved away to the big city, had a career, affairs with married men, and continues taking Teams calls during a biopsy – basically that fantasy episode from Friends where Phoebe was a businesswoman who smoked all the way through her heart attack.

They got the shocking news their mum has been found dead – the woman on the beach – but not on holiday in Anglesey, as she had told them, but on the Isle of Man.

Finding out why she was there is not the first surprise for the sisters, but the truths they uncover on the island have a far-reaching impact on their own lives.

For the first time they question the roles they so easily settled into all those years ago, and the million little resentments they've let fester.

Maryland is good on the sibling relationship between Becca and Rosaline, one minute recreating childhood games, the next shouting recriminations at each other, pushing each other's buttons in the way only siblings can do.

Becca has been ringing round their mum's friends to tell them of the tragedy, doing the organising, getting things sorted in the way she's clearly been doing for decades.

“I can ring them,” says Rosaline, in the tone of voice that says it's the last thing she wants to do.

There's a lot about pretending, about being something you're not, and whether you can reconcile the life you've built with the life you want, about finding the space to be yourself and other people not allowing you to, about caring for someone and that person resenting having to be cared for, about how our upbringing affects our future.

“Were you close?” asks amorous cabbie Jacob (Dean Lennox Kelly) of Rosaline and her mother.

“Not massively. We pretended to be because that's what you do.”

While Jones and Best are excellent as the sisters coming to terms with their idealised versions of the other's life being revealed as fictions, Jacob is the weak link.

Apparently giving up a life in finance for a simpler existence as the Isle of Man's only taxi driver, he's supposed to be a counterpoint to the pretence going on elsewhere.

He is true to himself, a free spirit, with a well-kept beard and a penchant for impromptu wild swimming.

If he appeared in the Guardian's Blind Date column you'd tut and immediately he's too good to be true. And that's problem, while Becca and Rosaline seem to be well-rounded characters with hinterlands and flaws, Jacob is flatly two-dimensional.

But, to be honest, that's a minor quibble.

Maryland is that rare thing in TV drama these days; a show with no forensics, no maverick detectives, no white tents over long-dug graves.

It's a show which starts with a death, but turns out to be about life.

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (BBC2, Mon, 9pm) should be required viewing for everyone confused about hard borders and Irish protocols. An examination of The Troubles through the eyes of those who lived through it, it's an absorbing piece of living history.

As someone for whom cancer has hit very close to home, Afterglow (BBC4, Sat, 9pm) was a tough watch, but this Norwegian drama about a woman diagnosed with cancer on her 40th birthday manages to be truthful about the illness while avoiding horrific bleakness.