Prime Suspect
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Prime Suspect is a highly-acclaimed Granada Television police procedural television drama series of the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, which has been followed up by several sequels. The screenplays of the first three mini-series were written by Lynda La Plante.
Helen Mirren plays Jane Tennison, a hard-bitten female detective (DCI)—and starting in the third mini-series, Detective Superintendent—in a male-dominated profession in this crime series. The character was said to be based on Jackie Malton, who acted as an advisor to the authors.
The programme was part of a trend for programmes/films with women in both leading roles, and holding senior authority positions. One UK television example is M.I.T., a spin off from The Bill on ITV. The series may have antecedants in such dramas as Silence of the Lambs (female central character and serial killer plotline) and in Juliet Bravo (UK police procedural with female leads).
The first series features sexism in the workplace as a significant subplot, and as a barrier to the investigation. Sequels tend to underplay this, relying on straight procedure or on other subplots (institutional racism in Prime Suspect 2, work/life balance as a recurring theme).
Prime Suspect's format amounts to a series of mini-series: each case runs for several nights of two hours. In the 1990s, five such mini-series each completed a case. Prime Suspect 6 broadcasts began in the United States on April 18, 2004, and Mirren has said she expects to make the seventh her last.
Filmography
- Prime Suspect (1991)
- Prime Suspect 2 (1992)
- 4 1-hour episodes
- Prime Suspect 3 (1993) [1]
- Prime Suspect 4 (1995)
- The Lost Child
- Inner Circles
- Scent of Darkness
- Prime Suspect 5: Errors of Judgment (1996) [2]
- Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness (2004) [3]
- 2 2-hour episodes
Spoof
In 1995 a short spoof episode, Prime Cracker, was produced for the BBC's bi-annual Red Nose Day charity telethon in aid of Comic Relief. A crossover with ITV stablemate crime drama Cracker, the spoof starred Mirren and Cracker lead Robbie Coltrane as their characters from the respective series, sending-up the perceived ultra seriousness of both shows.