Women with a Mission

Abstract

Prime Suspect constitutes a transitional text in the history of TV crime drama, for its simultaneous intervention into the genre's sexual politics and representation of `realism'. Camerawork is structured around a gendered dichotomy and there is an explicit concern in the text with who `looks', and at whom. The refusal or inability to be able to `see' the female victims becomes a motif highlighting the relative visibility and invisibility of different women and, with it, the gendered power structures contained in the act of looking. With its graphic attention to forensic detail and the foregrounding of the authenticity of the corpse, Prime Suspect paved the way in 1991 for the kinds of visual signifiers of `realism' now taken for granted in the genre. The intersection of these themes marks this text as a decisive moment in Lynda La Plante's ongoing reconfiguration of the boundaries and structures of TV crime drama.