Why the stars of our best TV dramas are suddenly all middle-aged women
FOr great British drama today, it’s a case of dialling 999. For the most riveting shows on television all feature sleuths and detectives in storylines fuelled by emotion that confront complex moral dilemmas. Crime TV has grown up from the early days of Dixon Of Dock Green and Z Cars.
These highly acclaimed series have another major factor in common. They all star women — not young actresses but adult women — playing mature characters full of flaws and contradictions.
Currently, we are in the middle of two rival series — both starring the outstanding Nicola Walker. In one, she is playing the compassionate senior copper in charge of a historic murder inquiry in ITV’s unforgotten. In the other, it’s the hyperactive, mocking — and, incidentally, stone- dead — DS Stevie Stevenson in river on BBC1.
Sunday night saw Anne-Marie Duff as a reluctant detective, dragged out of retirement to hunt down a serial killer with a grudge against her, in From Darkness, also on BBC1.
And that’s just this week. In recent months we’ve been treated to superlative performances by Suranne Jones (in Doctor Foster, the anatomy of a marriage break- up), Sheridan Smith (as a widowed constable in the undercover police thriller Black Work) and Gillian Anderson (on the trail of a sex killer in The Fall).
Then there’s Sarah Lancashire (simply superb as a tough police sergeant in happy Valley), Olivia Colman (investigating the killing of her best friend’s son in Broadchurch), Keeley hawes (a detective fighting corruption charges in Line Of Duty) and Anna Maxwell Martin (an exorcist and religious sleuth in Midwinter Of The Spirit).
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s another highly touted police drama, Cuffs, promised tonight, starring Amanda Abbington, from Sherlock and Mr Selfridge.
It’s no exaggeration to say that just about all of these actresses have been tipped for Baftas and similar awards. They’ve blown us away.
Perhaps the greatest impact was made by Suranne Jones in Doctor Foster, the tale of a wronged wife who turned private detective to uncover her unfaithful husband’s lies.
The five-part drama benefited at first from its scheduling, tapping into a huge audience straight after The Great British Bake Off on Wednesday evenings. It needed this boost at the beginning because the plot was melodramatic and the clues improbable: highly strung brunette Gemma’s world fell apart, simply because she discovered a long blonde hair on her husband’s jacket.
But by the third episode, viewers were hooked by the sheer neurotic power of Jones’s performance. She wasn’t likeable — a fact her amiably charming husband Simon (Bertie Carvel) exploited, as he tricked her GP colleagues and neighbours into covering up his infidelity.
Jones’s genius was to retain our sympathy without playing girlish and vulnerable. She was an angry, uncompromising woman driven by sheer grief at her husband’s betrayal. She didn’t like herself and she didn’t expect anyone else to like her either, not even her adolescent son.
But she did believe that her husband loved her. The pain of finding out, instead, that he was leeching off her, wasting their savings and stealing her salary, was more than her sanity could bear.
When she took revenge by humiliating him in front of his lover and his business partner, and then tricked him into believing she had murdered their son, the online reaction of many viewers was remarkable. Instead of condemning her, they complained Gemma had let her love-rat hubby escape too lightly.
Some even complained he should have been killed off.
‘ I want to murder Gemma’s husband myself!’ snorted one fan on Twitter. ‘Just kill him!’ urged another.
Suranne Jones co-stars in a more conventional crime story, the methodical police drama Scott & Bailey, with Lesley Sharp. That’s written by playwright Sally Wainwright, as is BBC1’s bitter and gritty portrait of a rural community in the grip of drugs, happy Valley — back for a second innings next year with the unstoppable Sarah Lancashire.
On the surface, the first series of happy Valley was the tale of a kidnap gone wrong, with Steve Pemberton as a resentful accountant who tried to boost his pension plan by holding the boss’s daughter to ransom.
But from the opening scene, where she confronted a drug addict who was threatening to set himself alight, Lancashire had the show by the scruff of its neck. She ruled the screen, playing a police sergeant whose daughter had committed suicide after being raped.
harsh and sometimes shockingly violent, the six-part drama was completely dominated by Lancashire’s raw acting.
She made no concessions as she hunted down her daughter’s rapist: she didn’t care whether anyone liked her, and she didn’t expect the world to give her a single break.
Grown-up female roles like these were once a rarity. In fact, during the golden age of hollywood they were non- existent. While a male star could be the leading man throughout middle age, actresses were either glamorous young lovers or doughty pensioners. There was nothing in between.
Think of Lauren Bacall, who was electrifying as a young woman opposite humphrey Bogart in To have And have Not (in 1944, when she was 20 and Bogie was 46) and The Big Sleep two years later.
By the time she was 30, the big roles had pretty much dried up.
There was almost no such thing as a middle-aged female star throughout her many years in cinema. Bacall was 78 before she reinvented her career with a controversial part in director Lars von Trier’s 2003 drama Dogville.
helen Mirren cracked the mould on television as DI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, a hard- drinking obsessive with poor taste in men but an unflinching instinct for solving murders.
Mirren was 46 when the series first aired and 61 when it ended. The role brought her a Bafta for best actress and demonstrated that women detectives could be just as hard-boiled as men, with far more emotional range.
It was a long wait for another female on the force who gripped our imagination as hard, and it took a Dane to do it.
The Killing, a 20-part dissection of the lives destroyed when a teenage girl went missing, starred 39-year-old Sofie Grabol as mistrustful, eccentric Sarah Lund, who hurts everyone she loves in her all-consuming determination to find the criminal.
In Britain, it was Olivia Colman as teary police sergeant ellie Miller in Broadchurch (featuring murder, deceit and child abuse in a seaside town) who opened the doors for other actresses to take over the crime genre.
Before the first episode aired on ITV in March 2013, all the talk was of how the show’s headline star David Tennant would handle his first role as a detective.
BuT no one was talking about the former Doctor Who by the second week: all eyes were on ellie. TV executives and writers realised that viewers would be more gripped by a drama if the main character was a woman — not a cutie, not eager for approval, not on screen to tickle a male actor’s ego, but an adult female.
It didn’t matter if the script was shaky. Sheridan Smith proved this, as PC Jo Gillespie in Black Work earlier this year, unmasking the killers of her husband, an undercover policeman — and discovering his secret second family at the same time.
even if the central premise of a series was repugnant, a powerful female role at the centre could hold it together. The Fall, the twisted story of a serial killer terrorising Belfast, glorified stalking and murder.
It made a sex symbol of its rapist hero, played by Jamie Dornan — but the truly memorable element was Gillian Anderson’s depiction of the explosive DSI Stella Gibson.
Midwinter Of The Spirit, ITV’s occult detective thriller earlier this autumn, might have been laughable with a male lead.
But Anna Maxwell Martin, as the trainee exorcist priest, gave viewers a character they could believe in, even when the hallowe’en effects were lamentable.
Keeley hawes took advantage of good writing and a strong supporting cast in last year’s Line Of Duty (BBC2), which followed every tortuous step of a police corruption probe, to leave viewers with their heads whirling. her character seemed guilty and innocent, corrupt and misunderstood, sometimes all of these in the space of a scene.
Call it layered, call it deep, call it emotional. In the end, the dominance of superb actresses in crime dramas comes down to one thing: at long last, this is grown-up television.
Read Christopher Stevens on last night’s TV: Page 53.