I recently finished watching the British TV series Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren, in a 21 hour marathon, migraine inducing late night watching set of sessions. This a sooper-dooper amazing Helen Mirren showcase!
The series is about Jane Tennison, starting out as a junior detective, who slowly rises through the ranks and struggles to put away bad actors, as much as struggling with the internal politics and bureaucracy of the police force. Up, down and around she faces resistance and obstacles. Helen Mirren's performance is a tour de force.
In fact the beauty of the series is that you actually may not like the character. Jane Tennison is a fairly aggressive person and can roll over people. But she does whatever it takes to put the prime suspect away. Stories #1 and #4 are the best - where the bad guy is simply not someone you can believe can be that bad. In story 4 she tries to keep him in custody, while everyone else is trying to prove her wrong. She also hits the bottle hard as a consequence of all this and her struggles in her personal life. Her episodes with her father and her strained relationship with her sister are very well drawn out.
I have two quibbles with this series:
English Men, and indeed men at work are shown as boorish; perhaps for the sake of drama, or to show a contrast with Helen Mirren's character, Jane Tennison. That is a tad overdone
Every effect has a cause - is a mite simplistic and too neat. Cause and effect makes sense in physics. In psychology - sometimes a bad guy can be a bad guy without some sort of neat explanation. In fact the great Hitchcock got panned for his expository epilogue in Psycho. I mean panned!
Although as I raced through to the finish of the series of 7 seasons, something weird did happened. I only remember 2 things now.
The complex character of Helen Mirren
And all the Prime Suspects over the seven seasons rolled up into one bad guy - a nice looking, soft spoken pedophilistic, sadistic, racist, Bosnian war criminal!
Prime Suspect - What a series!
In fact the beauty of the series is that you actually may not like the character. Jane Tennison is a fairly aggressive person and can roll over people. But she does whatever it takes to put the prime suspect away. Stories #1 and #4 are the best - where the bad guy is simply not someone you can believe can be that bad. In story 4 she tries to keep him in custody, while everyone else is trying to prove her wrong. She also hits the bottle hard as a consequence of all this and her struggles in her personal life. Her episodes with her father and her strained relationship with her sister are very well drawn out.
I have two quibbles with this series:
English Men, and indeed men at work are shown as boorish; perhaps for the sake of drama, or to show a contrast with Helen Mirren's character, Jane Tennison. That is a tad overdone
Every effect has a cause - is a mite simplistic and too neat. Cause and effect makes sense in physics. In psychology - sometimes a bad guy can be a bad guy without some sort of neat explanation. In fact the great Hitchcock got panned for his expository epilogue in Psycho. I mean panned!
Although as I raced through to the finish of the series of 7 seasons, something weird did happened. I only remember 2 things now.
The complex character of Helen Mirren
And all the Prime Suspects over the seven seasons rolled up into one bad guy - a nice looking, soft spoken pedophilistic, sadistic, racist, Bosnian war criminal!
Prime Suspect - What a series!
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