Man, I remember when Prime Suspect was the hot British mystery, and Helen Mirren the hot lady cop, and how she had to work so hard to be taken seriously, had to suffer all manner of sexist crap, had to be hard and not show an ounce of femininity lest she be laughed off the force. And this was only in the early 1990s!

But only 15 years later, here we have DCI Janine Lewis (Caroline Quentin), who's one tough broad when it comes to taking down murderers in Manchester, but doesn't have to worry about being whatever kind of woman she wants to be. I mean, look: she's a single mum who's balancing the kids' soccer practice with interrogations, and she's managing it well, so I guess that makes it easier for her to mother the coppers on her team, too. She actually hugs her DI, Richard Mayne (Ian Kelsey), in the first episode of Blue Murder: Set 3 ... in a totally maternal way, that is. He's worried about a health issue he's dealing with and, of course, being a guy, he doesn't want to talk about it, but she can see he's upset so she hugs him to make him feel better.

Amazing.

I'm coming into the middle of the story with Set 3, now available from Acorn Media. Blue Murder is 12 mini-movies that aired on Britain's ITV between 2003 and 2007 -- they haven't yet played on American TV at all -- and these are the most recent three. Apparently, in the very first episode, way back in Set 1, Lewis came home early to celebrate her promotion to Detective Chief Inspector -- a very powerful and high-ranking position -- to find her husband in bed with someone else. Oops. Presumably she's undergone some trials in the divorced-mom-of-four game, but by Set 3, she seems to have things under control, leaving her relatively free to chase down, in these stories, the killer of a promising young soccer star (or football, as they call it over there), a respected doctor, and an army soldier about to ship out for overseas.

As mysteries go, these are pretty good, with lots of red herrings and characters you come to like only to find yourself hoping they don't turn out to be the killers -- the scripts are written by well-known mystery novelist Cath Staincliffe -- but as always, stuff like this rises and falls with the detective. If we don't like the detective, we don't care whether the mysteries even get solved. And, thank God, Lewis is a corker, and a refreshing example, however fictional, of the strides women can make without having to give up being women.

Also in the two-disc set: a standard making-of featurette, in which we discover that everyone loves working on the show and loves everyone else they work with.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
film reviews and TV blogging at FlickFilosopher.com

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