Cagney & Lacey in the 21st Century

It's a cop show about two women detectives, their lives, their loves, and their work fighting crime. One woman has a husband and kids, the other is single. One is blonde, one is brunette. They both care deeply about their work, and their audience comes to care deeply about them.

Depending on when you were born, and whether you've seen American cop shows from the 1980s or British cops shows from the 20teens, the names that this description evokes for you might be Cagney & Lacey, or Scott & Bailey, or if you're lucky, both.

In my teens I was a great fan of Cagney & Lacey. It was the first cop show I'd seen with strong central female characters - and their gender wasn't even the central focus of the show. (If you're old enough, or interested in television history, you may remember the cop show starring Angie Dickinson, made when the mere existence of a female cop was remarkable enough that the show was called Police Woman.) Cagney & Lacey was about these women, their partnership, their contrasting personalities, the team they worked with, and the crimes that they solved.

When I first read about Scott & Bailey - I think in a recommendation from amazon.co.uk - I was excited to see there was a new series co-created by Sally Wainwright, because I love her earlier series, At Home with the Braithwaites. Seeing that the lead roles would be played by Lesley Sharp, who was awesome as Alison Mundy in Afterlife, and Suranne Jones, who I'd recently seen for the first time as Idris in the Doctor Who episode 'The Doctor's Wife', made me even more keen to watch the show.

It's a hard-hitting drama. The victims and their families suffer, the perpetrators suffer, the cops suffer... There are some horrendously gruesome murders, one of which, in context, leaves us feeling sympathy for the killer. There are only six episodes in this first season - not unusual for British television dramas - and I really hope that there'll be more episodes to come. Sometimes the grimness of the storylines made me think I wouldn't want to watch the show again; then there'd be such brilliant writing and acting that I'd want to watch it again straight away to appreciate it more, and rewatch the whole series to see how the characters change and grow, and sometimes revert to old bad habits.

Rachel Bailey is a brilliant detective, but as her partner Janet Scott says, clueless when it comes to relationships. Janet is compassionate, professional, and loyal - qualities that come into conflict a few times. All the supporting characters, from the other cops in the Major Incident Team, through families and friends, to the villains of the week, and the philandering barrister, are all believable, though often surprising. And Manchester makes a great backdrop for the drama.

Another joy of watching Scott & Bailey was discovering Amelia Bullmore, who plays the boss, DCI Gill Murray. I have actually seen Amelia Bullmore before, but only in her comic roles. As well as having written some episodes of This Life, Attachments, and Black Cab, Bullmore has played comedy roles in Linda Green and The IT Crowd, dramatic roles in series including State of Play and Ashes to Ashes, and satire in TwentyTwelve (for Australian viewers, TwentyTwelve is Britain's answer to John Clarke, Bryan Dawe & Gina Riley organising the Sydney Olympics in The Games). At first I thought Gill was simply the stereotypical police chief in a police procedural which is basically a two-hander: staying in the office, briefing the team, having the occasional word with the lead characters, and clapping them on the back at the end of the episode. But we gradually and naturally find out that there's a lot more to Gill than this, giving her the depth that makes her situation in episode six an agonising one for her, for Janet Scott and Rachel Bailey, and for the audience. We want her to make the decision that will leave our heroes happy, but understand why that's almost impossible for Gill, a woman of great integrity who wants to believe that playing by the rules is best, and morality will always match with justice.

Also, the theme tune is fab. It's by Murray Gold, a film, television and theatre composer who has written music for Doctor Who since 2005. Part funky city track, part old-style Western theme, I'd listen to it for enjoyment on its own, and it works very well over the opening credits of Scott & Bailey.
I'm sure I've seen a youtube vid of the whole opening sequence, but can't find it now, so here's a trailer with part of the theme music.

Bonus extra: Here's a post about Amelia Bullmore's series Black Cab, from the blog Taxi-Mart News Blog

bad science, great faces

possible SPOILERS if you watch Fringe


watching Fringe is such a pleasure. I could quite happily just gaze at Anna Torv's face for the whole hour, with the other characters simply being voices from off screen, so it's a bonus that she brings acting skill to the role of Agent Olivia Dunham, and that several of the other actors are also greatly gaze-worthy (and good actors).



John Noble's sweetly craggy features are perfect for his mad-scientist role, the lovely, loony Walter Bishop. I do hope, however, that the scriptwriters ease up on the running gag of Walter's 'important requests', which made me laugh the first few times: Do you need anything while you conduct this experiment, Walter? Yes, I must have some cotton candy; blue, not pink. At the crime scene (a diner) Fed: What do you need? Walter: Could I have a bowl of this onion soup? Oh, and bring these two bodies back to my lab. now that I'm expecting each appearance of the gag it's a little less amusing.


and there's Kirk Acevedo, with an awful haircut (excusable I suppose by his character being FBI) detracting only slightly from his watchability. he looks just fine, even without the dashing, self-inflicted scar that he had slashed across his cheek as Miguel Alvarez in Oz. I do wish he'd smile more, though.



Joshua Jackson is reassuringly 'normal' looking as Walter's son Peter, Lance Reddick does a great 'serious' look as Olivia's boss Agent Broyles, and Jasika Nicole is very cute as the hapless (but probably very competent when she's not being co-opted as assistant to a mad scientist) Asterisk - sorry, Astrid.

the stories are a nice mix of conspiracy theories, emotive rescues of helpless victims, and really nasty bad guys, with some weird and wonderful 'science' thrown in.

sometimes it's the little things that irk me the most, not the outrageously bizarre 'stuff' that is the flabotnum (sp? phlibotnem? that word that Joss Whedon & his writing team used when talking about Buffy and Angel, meaning the hi-tech gizmo, spell, or alien force that did whatever they needed it to do as a plot device, without needing any annoying exposition) of the episode.


tonight's episode featured women who'd been abducted (oh, what a surprise! occasionally it's a man, sometimes a child, but most often women who are abducted) and injected with some drug that would interact with medical treatment they were having to make them highly radioactive and turn their heads into killer microwave ovens that could slaughter a roomful of people. I'm happy to go with that - reading SF since I was a kid has given me a high tolerance for weird science, as long as it has internal consistency.

the bits that bugged me where when evil scientist #2 (a pretty Asian American woman who we first saw wearing full hazchem/radioactivity-proof suit, who then revealed her feminine beauty by taking off the ugly great protective helmet/mask/hood thingy and shaking out her lovely long hair) was about to inject the 'bad stuff' into a drip solution that was feeding into the poor abducted woman. evil scientist #2 held up the syringe and flicked it to get the air bubbles out before injecting it into the drip solution - but the 'bad stuff' was about a centimetre below the top of the syringe! there was no point flicking to get tiny air bubbles out when she hadn't yet pushed the plunger far enough to get the liquid up to the needle. silly evil scientist!
(it was probably so that we could see there was some brightly coloured bad stuff in the syringe, it wasn't just a groovy red syringe with nothing in it)

the other bit that bugged me (and I'm probably just being picky here) was when the 'good stuff' cooked up by our lovely mad scientist saved the second abducted woman by massively reducing the level of radioactivity in her body within a second or so. a bit unfair of me, really - it did make for a lovely dramatic denouement, and if I'm going to buy the delayed release radiotherapy nano-capsules the women were being treated with, and Walter's mad genius overall, then why not accept an anti-radioactivity drug that acts faster than Narcan?

I did feel sorry for the poor little bald rat who was used to test the second abducted woman's killer microwaves. at least they blew its head up while it was hiding under her medical gown - Fringe is tactful like that, we see exploding heads only indirectly, even when it's a rat's head.