Retiring a Classic
Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect go out with class
As the great
Prime Suspect crime-drama franchise airs its final chapter (Sunday, Nov. 12 on PBS, check
listings), terrible grief and emotional turmoil await fans — not to be confused with our despair over this being
Helen Mirren's last turn as the tough, troubled Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison.
There's not a wrong note, no concession to sentiment or vanity, in Mirren's brilliant swan song. The case that will cap Tennison's career, as she faces unwelcome retirement, is a shattering doozy, involving the disappearance of a teenage star pupil. But the real suspense in the two-part Prime Suspect: The Final Act is whether Tennison can hold it together long enough to solve the case and salvage her own professional reputation.
Because "the guv" (as her coworkers call her) is a mess: drinking to the point of blackouts, stewing in bitter loneliness, tending to a dying father who forces her to confront her distant, disapproving family. When this emotional train wreck bonds with one of the victim's classmates, who reminds Tennison of the girl she used to be and the daughter she never had, it feels dangerously inappropriate and leads to dire twists.
Toward the story's end, Tennison barks at a subordinate, "Don't call me ma'am. I'm not the bloody queen." This from a star at her peak who just won an Emmy as HBO's Elizabeth I and who's an Oscar front-runner as the modern Elizabeth in The Queen.
Jane Tennison is history, but Mirren will always be TV royalty to me.
Movie Master
Here's a chance to relive Hollywood history at its most colorfully pungent. Peter Bogdanovich has refreshed his 1971 documentary Directed by John Ford (TCM, Nov. 7, 8 pm/ET) with new interviews (Spielberg and Scorsese on Ford's influence), but what resonates in this bio of the great director are wonderfully revealing late-'60s anecdotes from John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, amid glimpses of the irascible Ford.
Star Trackers
In BBC America's fast-paced fly-on-the-wall docuseries Paparazzi (Wednesdays, 9 pm/ET), it's all about Big Pictures, a notorious photo agency specializing in big pictures: tabloid-ready shots of the likes of Brangelina in exotic settings. Impresario Darryn Lyons, with his multihued mohawk, rallies his troops around the world, badgering them as they lie in wait on beaches and city streets like vultures. Their giddy pride in their achievement is only slightly more pathetic than the public's leering interest in their results.
