Haven't I Seen You Before?

Well before the ending of the first part in the newest — and last — installment of Prime Suspect, I successfully guessed the who in the whodunit. But that shouldn’t keep Jane Tennison fans or anyone else from watching it. The draw of this now-legendary British detective series has always been the magnificent and fascinating Helen Mirren. She’s turned headstrong, embattled Detective Superintendent Tennison into a riveting mix of crusading drive and private demons that has only been matched in this country by Dennis Franz’s self-destructive badge wearer Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue. Writer Frank Deasy isn’t going to win any awards for the sputtering plot mechanics of the missing-preteen-girl case at the heart of Prime Suspect: The Final Act, but to follow Tennison around is to get swept up in Mirren’s skills at galvanizing your attention through sheer force of character.

This time the strain on Tennison is formidable: impending retirement, a losing struggle with alcoholism and watching her father (Frank Finlay) die. Never married and as lonely a figure that crime fiction has ever produced, the heart nearly swells when she takes the minimal effort to befriend one of the victim’s school chums, a smart-yet-troubled 14-year-old (Laura Greenwood) whose flirtation with rebellion and disarming caginess she recognizes and — considering the trajectory of her own working woman’s life, from carefree idealist to authority fighter to management figure — obviously mourns. The big question here is whether Tennison, who is as much defined by her mistakes as her accomplishments, can make it to pensionhood without one more personal indiscretion becoming one more professional screwup. That you’ll be more worried about Tennison’s race to the finish of her career than her race to catch a culprit is testament to the lasting legacy of this 15-year-old bastion of U.K. television and the everyday majesty Mirren brings to her scrappy, flawed, inelegantly tough female crime solver.

End of the whodunit queen? Helen Mirren’s final act in Prime Suspect.

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More About

• Brett Hopper
• Jane Tennison
• Helen Mirren
• 24 (TV Show)
• Stanley Tucci

DAY BREAK | ABC | Wed., 9 p.m. Premieres Nov. 15.

3 LBS.| CBS | Tues., 10 p.m. Premiers Nov. 14.

PRIME SUSPECT: THE FINAL ACT| PBS | Sun., Nov. 12 & 19, 9 p.m.