ABSTRACT
TV montage or clip shows have become a cheap and common staple in contemporary television schedules; these magazine-style ‘lists’ are generally held together by a handful of soundbites from celebrity commentators, then padded out with clips, often taken from nostalgia-inducing old favourites. In September 2001, Channel 4’s Top Ten TV series broadcast a show dedicated to ‘Cops’ with David Soul of Starsky and Hutch fame (ABC, 1975-79) at the helm. Reaching the end of the countdown, suspense was accompanied by some apparent surprise as it was revealed: ‘Yes – our number one TV cop is a woman!’ Ten years after its ITV debut, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison (ITV, 1991-2006) – the lone woman Detective Chief Inspector compellingly played by Helen Mirren, who so memorably battled within and against the systemically misogynistic police service to convict a serial killer – had taken the prime position in this TV poll. It is difficult to imagine today that this result would be divulged in quite this way, where, implicitly, the foregrounding of Tennison’s gender marks it/her as still something of a novelty for the genre. Women protagonists now populate the genre with ubiquity, unquestionably in large part due to the success of Prime Suspect. But equally, the poll result evidenced popular recognition of just how widely esteemed, and how landmark, Prime Suspect had already become in the history of TV crime drama by this time. The show would eventually number seven ‘mini-series’ broadcast with some irregularity, but always met with huge anticipation, over a period of 15 years (Jermyn, 2009). Along the way, as Gray Cavender and Nancy Jurik note, it ‘aired in seventy-eight countries and worldwide audiences for some episodes [approached] two hundred million viewers’ (2012, p. 3). The show was held to be a triumph for British TV – critically and commercially, nationally and internationally – from the outset. This chapter sets out to explore how it is, then, that against the backdrop of such an accomplished history, in 2011 Prime Suspect was adapted into a US remake only to be swiftly dropped from schedules after just a single season.
