In April 1991, Lynda La Plante created the show Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren and quietly but forever changed the landscape of crime drama. There had been hard drinking, chain smoking, all-consumed-by-the-job-at-the-expense-of-their-private-lives detectives on television before, but Prime Suspect offered us the first vision of such a character as a woman, a revolutionary idea at the time.
Mirren’s detective chief inspector (DCI) Jane Tennison — based on real police officer Jackie Milton — was in her 40s, placed in a position of some authority but ignored in the male-dominated world in which she found herself and tolerated as a diversity hire at best.
The first season of the show introduces us to Tennison in her role as a side character in an office full of adrenaline-pumped lads crowing as they seemed to swiftly solve a case involving a murdered prostitute. Gradually we are given insight into Tennison’s personal life and watch as circumstances allow her to make an ambitious play for taking over the case after the lead detective suffers a fatal heart attack.
Her dedication to the task brings her into constant and increasingly bitter conflict with the old boys of the police force but eventually she proves herself by diligently pursuing the facts and bringing the murderer to justice. It earns her begrudging respect from the men in charge — and sets her up for a further six seasons. We watch as she becomes increasingly obsessed with her career at the expense of everything else — from romantic and familial relationships to health and her ever slimmer hopes of motherhood. Her relentless pursuit of truth is the only thing that sustains her and she’s refreshingly indifferent to the approval or respect from male colleagues it earns.
Not all of the subsequent seasons’ plots and themes — from racial discrimination to the ethical challenges of the Bosnian conflict and the treatment of children by the English welfare system — hit their targets as effectively as they could. But overall, particularly in its first five seasons, La Plante’s creation remained the foremost social realist crime drama in global television.
Mirren had enjoyed some success as a film star in the 1960s and had spent the better part of the next two decades becoming a stalwart of British theatre, but it was only after her role as Tennison that her film career took off and catapulted her into the realm of screen royalty. Her line in the very first episode: “Don’t call me ma’am ... I’m not the bloody queen,” became an ironic forebear of what was to come when she went on to play the bloody queen in the 2006 film The Queen and won a Best Actress Oscar.
In a present-day streaming universe populated by a wealth of different leading roles that display myriad women of varying ages, races, sexual preferences and professions it may be hard to imagine that just three decades ago things were very different and it took DCI Jane Tennison to blaze the trail.
With all seven seasons — also the unfortunately much too weak final 2006 outing, which Mirren had to be coaxed back for — now available on the new BBC/ITV streaming service BritBox, there’s no better time to dive back into the seminal series that changed the face of the crime procedural.
It still stands up not only for its pioneering examination of the realities of life for women fighting to succeed in male-dominated worlds but also for its gritty realism, carefully drawn plots and the difficult but increasingly sympathetic character at its centre.
Prime Suspect is available on BritBox: britbox.com/za/
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