The Best Women Detectives on British TV
Don’t send a lad
One of my favorite things about British crime dramas and police procedurals is how many of them feature strong women characters.
One of the best known police dramas on British TV is the ITV series Prime Suspect, which ran for seven seasons between 1991 and 2006. It featured the incomparable Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, a highly effective protagonist who fought battles against both criminals and the old boys’ club (often engaging in some borderline criminal activity of their own) of the Metropolitan Police. Throughout the series, Tennison engaged in several romantic liaisons, often with colleagues, but in the end, her ambition and dedication to solving her cases always proved more important to her than maintaining personal relationships.
Series creator and writer, Lynda La Plante, has said that she based Tennison’s character on a DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) who “gained extraordinary respect from her male colleagues because she ate, slept, and breathed the job.”
In 2017, ITV produced a prequel to the series, titled Prime Suspect: Tennison, that was set in the 1970s. It provided some insight into the development of Tennison’s character and ambition, but was done largely without La Plante’s involvement, which is perhaps part of the reason it was not well-reviewed and ran for only one season.
Prime Suspect is one of the most well-known British police dramas around, but another outing by Lynda La Plante, titled Above Suspicion (based on her book of the same title), also features a notable female character, rookie DC (Detective Constable) Anna Travis, played by Kelly Reilly. Thrown into the deep end on her first case, searching for a serial killer, Travis is determined to show everyone around her, especially the men and particularly her supervising officer, that she has the detective chops necessary to survive.
The show ran for four seasons, and a total of eleven episodes; and the character of Travis stands out as a female protagonist who wants to succeed but also obviously wants a personal life and love.
The most direct descendant to Mirren’s Tennison in recent British television is Gillian Anderson’s riveting Metropolitan Police superintendent Stella Gibson in the crime/serial-killer drama The Fall. Gibson is dedicated to the pursuit of Jamie Dornan’s serial-killer character Paul Spector, but she is also honest about her no-nonsense pursuit of sexual partners. When grilled by the Northern Irish Internal Affairs-type investigator about a one-night stand she had with a fellow police officer, her reply is simple but perfect: “Man fucks woman. Subject, man; verb, fucks; object, woman. That’s okay. Woman fucks man. Woman, subject; man, object . . . that’s not so comfortable for you, is it?”
I’m not giving anything away when I reveal The Fall’s killer to be Spector; the viewer finds out as much in the first few minutes of the first episode. The pleasure in watching this program is not figuring out who did it, but in simply watching how Anderson as Gibson tracks down the predator. She mixes complete badassery, as when she stares down a threatening gang of men in an unstable Belfast neighborhood, with resigned understanding, as when she suggests that women’s compliance does not always equal consent. It is impossible to look away from her or stop watching this series once you start.
The detective who Brenda Blethyn plays in the criminally underrated drama Vera seems, at first glance, to be anything but competent. Unfussy in appearance and seemingly random in her methods, DCI Vera Stanhope nonetheless possesses a mind that is always thinking through the crimes she is investigating. She, too, has her own demons, particularly those surrounding her relationship with her family, but she is always willing to consider the too-human motives behind often appalling crimes.
Of note in the Vera series is her working relationship with her Detective Sergeants Joe Ashworth and Aiden Healy; she attempts to keep her emotional distance with them, but they keep her grounded and provide emotional connections that she clearly hadn’t realized she needed. An eleventh series of this program is planned for 2021.
Another woman who struggles to leave her professional life at the police station is Catherine Cawood, the Yorkshire policewoman at the heart of the series Happy Valley. Focusing on a rural setting beset by drugs and violence, Happy Valley is anything but happy (or idyllic). Cawood, played to perfection by Sarah Lancashire, understands the problems of those she polices. In her own words: “I’m forty-seven, I’m divorced, I live with my sister who’s a recovering heroin addict, I’ve two grown-up children, one dead, one who doesn’t speak to me, and a grandson.”
The violence in Happy Valley is gut-wrenching to watch, but viewers are compelled to follow how Cawood manages to do her job, help save a kidnapping victim, and keep tabs on the drug dealer recently released from prison who she believes raped and impregnated her daughter. She is less a Yorkshire police officer than she is a force of nature.
And then there’s No Offence, written by Paul Abbott (who also brought you the groundbreaking drama Shameless). I can’t really say anything about this program other than you need to watch it, immediately. Set in Manchester, it features Joanna Scanlon as DI Viv Deering, who not only is not intimidated by her male colleagues and supervisors, but likes to get into their personal space (including following them into the bathroom) to intimidate them. Add her two DS’s Dinah Kowalska (Elaine Cassidy) and Joy Freers (Alexandra Roach) to the mix, and you have a trio of tough, driven detectives who will do anything to get the job done, and who also have each others’ backs.
All of the police dramas you watch can’t be relentlessly dark, so you might also want to throw in the long-running series New Tricks for some lighter fare. In this show, no-nonsense DS Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman) is put in charge of a (fictional) unit in the Metropolitan Police Service that focuses on cold crimes, and her detectives are, well, not the newest recruits around. Even working with her decidedly set-in-their-ways and definitely not young squad, however, she manages to encourage their best work and they keep busy solving cases nobody else could solve.
Although the “lone wolf” trope is common in detective and police shows, two other British programs highlight partnerships between policewomen. The drama in these programs is driven nearly as much by the friendships between the main characters, as it is by the crimes being committed and solved. When creating her “feminist” cop-buddy show Scott & Bailey, writer Sally Wainwright, like La Plante, was inspired by a real detective: Greater Manchester Police Detective Inspector Diane Taylor. Wainwright’s consultations with Taylor (who, tragically, died in 2016 at the age of 55) enabled Wainwright to let her stars — Suranne Jones as Rachel Bailey and Lesley Sharp as Janet Scott — be tough and talented investigators, as well as friends and characters with complicated personal lives.
A slight digression here to note that both Happy Valley and Scott & Bailey were created and are written by Sally Wainwright, which is, quite frankly, amazing. Not only are the characters she creates strong, driven women, clearly Wainwright herself knows her way around a demanding work schedule.
Although its run was short (it only ran for two seasons), the crime series Murder in Suburbia also features the collaborative friendship and banter between the more cerebral Kate Ashurst (Caroline Katz) and her more intuitive colleague Emma Scribbins (Lisa Faulkner). This show is lighter in tone than any other program on this list, perhaps owing to its suburban London setting, and the viewer can be content knowing these detectives will always catch their perpetrator, as well as engage in much commentary about the seriously small dating pool in their small community.
Strong women characters are also abundant in the police series Line of Duty. Featuring the anti-corruption unit (AC-12) of the Metropolitan Police (analogous to internal affairs police officers in the U.S.), this series demands and rewards close attention. DS Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), DI Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes), DCI Roseanne Huntley (Thandie Newton), and DCS Patricia Carmichael (Anna Maxwell Martin) must all answer or face these questions: Which cops are crooked? How are the anti-corruption officers going to get them to admit to their wrongdoings? How do the anti-corruption officers themselves sometimes act unethically?
So, yeah: Being a woman can be hard. Finding women detectives on British television who don’t stop until their cases are solved? That’s easy!
Sarah Cords is the author of Bingeworthy British Television: The Best Brit TV You Can’t Stop Watching. Fellow curmudgeons welcome at citizenreader.com.
