Prime Suspect 2

Prime Suspect 2 picks up just a year after the events from the first series. Tennison has established her name and reputation, but still crashes into the glass ceiling at full force. Prime Suspect 2 also adds in a newer layers, bringing in racial tensions, police brutality, and pornography to its central mystery. It’s an improvement over the first series, but still only flirting with the brilliance that the remainder of the series would be operating at.

When the remains of a tied-up girl are found in a neighborhood backyard, Tennison is joined in her investigation by Robert Oswalde, the newly hired black detective. While the first series saw Tennison’s rough initiation because of her gender, Oswalde’s is tied into his race. Since the murder took place in an era primarily composed to Caribbean natives, Oswalde is brought in to take the lead on the case, hoping to diffuse or ease any potential troubles between the citizens and the police department.

At times the series leans a little hard on the social issues, drifting a little too far away from Tennison’s personal growth and journey. Her love affair with Oswalde is kept quiet out of her desire for professional respect and career-driven single-mindedness. Later on we will see the various sacrifices and toils this has caused her, but it gets a little too muted here. When she is pulled off of the case, briefly, we see how rudderless and hopeless she is as a person without her job to define her. It’s these moments into Tennison’s mental and emotional space that make Prime Suspect so beloved. Prime Suspect 2 could have used a few more of them.

But it’s still a solidly made piece of television. I appreciate that this series finds its resolutions as anti-climaxes. These detectives stare into the abyss of human behavior, powerless to stop it from happening, but hoping to stop it from happening again. There’s a general sense of feeling adrift among these detectives that’s strangely compelling. They’re not the super-humans of American TV, but people trying desperately to do a tiny bit of good.