I remember being very excited about “Prime Suspect” when it first started airing on Masterpiece Theater in the 1990s.
I tried watching a few episodes more recently and it just doesn’t seem to work. All the things that made it seem different at the time – Tennyson’s personality, etc., just seem contrived now.
And a lot of the plot points seem run-of-the-mill. Aren’t we over serial killers by this point?
Some things seem absolutely ridiculous, like an archvillain named “The Street.” And being able to tell from the reconstruction of a skull that a murder victim was an educated black woman.
I just got done watching all episodes and thought much the same. Maybe two episodes were good
and maybe every couple years it worked better. But I think that after watching the “Columbo” episodes a few months ago, most of those were better although you would think with it’s contrived format it would not.
Wow, I couldn’t disagree more. I recently rewatched my favorite of the series – Prime Suspect III, the one about the murder of a young boy which led Tennison to uncover a child prostitution ring – and I found it as gripping as ever, particularly the performances of its amazing cast. With Peter Capaldi (aka Malcolm Tucker from “In the Loop / The Thick of It” and Frobisher from “Torchwood: Children of Time”) as transsexual Vera Reynolds, David Thewlis as scumbag pimp Jimmy Jackson, Ciaran Hinds as Edward Parker-Jones, how bad could it be? (I didn’t have to look those character names up… I’ve watched this particular series so often that these folks are burned into my brain!)
I did think “The Street” was a silly name, and by the later series I was getting frustrated for Tennison’s utter screwed-up-ness, but Mirren never fails to captivate me in the role. Plus I loved all the “lads” on the squad, at least the ones we got to know in the first few series.
That said, I don’t think the remake really has a point to it. It’s twenty years later and we’ve seen many more female detectives in leadership roles on TV, so the series’ chief premise has kind of become out of date, at least on television. Plus aren’t Kyra Sedgewick, Holly Hunter, and Glenn Close already playing variations of the role?
It seems that half the scenes are there to demonstrate Tennyson being a strong, independent woman in charge and her subordinates or her superiors giving her funny looks for it. They really clang hard.