Ready for “Prime” Time

Both New York Magazine and Slate weigh in on actress Helen Mirren’s seventh--and last--turn as “hard-bitten,” hard-drinking British police inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect: The Final Act, a two-part drama that will show in the United States on successive Sundays, November 12 and 19 at 9 p.m. ET.

In New York, John Leonard runs through the plots and high (or low) points of the previous Prime Suspect series, before applauding the ways in which this newest installment restores Tennison to her original defiant and determined character. He writes:

[T]he old Jane is back. What I can tell you, carefully, is that Prime Suspect: The Final Act incorporates and refines precious elements from all these previous hours--the father whose birthday Jane missed, the ghostly child who never was, the earliest nemesis at Scotland Yard, the satisfactions of a job well done, what music and art can do to allay loneliness and grief and what they can’t, why being an adult means living with your choices, how listening at full alert sounds the darkest depths, and the address of the nearest AA meeting. It’s like saying good-bye to Leopold Bloom.

Slate TV critic Troy Patterson remarks too that Mirren is “working at the height of her art” in Final Act, as he exalts Tennison’s “beautifully tragic” life:

Tennison’s father is dying of cancer. She herself is facing the living death of retirement. She hates her sister, the silly cow. ... The drinking’s gotta stop, and it won’t: I thought I’d seen Tennison get really hammered, and then I saw her get really hammered. The character might have had a chance at happiness had she been a mere cliché, cardboard and hard-boiled, but Mirren went and made her as vivid as life itself. I could spend all day watching her put on a hat: In one of Mirren’s many striking scenes, Tennison is at her father’s house, drinking alone, and she opens a box containing the hat she wore as a 17-year-old bobby. She caresses it, pulls it on, smoothes her hair, fits the brim just right, juts her chin with just pride, and beams--and then her eyes fill up fast with an impossible weight. A second later, still at her dad’s, she drop[s] the needle on an LP, and the room fills up with Dusty Springfield’s “Stay Awhile,” and Jane Tennison dances by herself, twirling even as the record skips, and the song’s still playing when she crawls into bed to pass out. The scene is heartbreaking: This is Jane’s lone moment of freedom.

I guess you know what I’ll be doing on Sunday night.