The photo being used to promote NBC's version of Prime Suspect is striking. It features actress Maria Bello staring straight at the camera in a gunslinger pose. There's a bandana around her neck, one hand is on her hip and the other is poised over a gun in a holster. It's a classic cowboy pic.
Maria Bello is a good actor. She did a notable stint on ER, was excellent in the action movie The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and won a Golden Globe for her work in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. She is an attractive woman, tall with long blond tresses. Also, she is the co-founder and very active in an organization working to improve women's health care in Haiti.
She is not, however, Helen Mirren. It turns out she is not meant to be. NBC's version of Prime Suspect is a reboot, not a remake.
It also turns out that Bello and the producers of NBC's Prime Suspect (coming in September, on Global in Canada) have a curious tactic for selling the show to critics.
The original Prime Suspect, created by Lynda LaPlante was seven miniseries, the first made in 1991 and the last in 2006. Mirren played Detective Jane Tennison, a driven, often angry cop who began by battling sexism from male colleagues and ended by battling alcoholism. The much-admired and award-winning dramas were striking for their relentless realism and Mirren's portrayal of a middle-aged woman struggling to cope with work, men and alcohol. They were serious dramas, often drenched in sadness, brooding on the awfulness of humanity.
Not so with this reboot. Bello sits there, gorgeous in a green dress, as far from Mirren's Jane Tennison, even on her good days, as it is possible to imagine. A thing she wants to talk about is a hat.
In the NBC pilot, Bello is Jane Timoney, a New York detective much loathed by her male colleagues because she's a woman and had a relationship with some upper-echelon male cop. They are relentless in baiting her and call her terrible names, including "whore." Jane winces but carries on regardless, chasing bad guys, getting beaten up. She also wears a fedora hat and, frankly it looks goofy. All the reporters here know that. They want to talk about the hat, and Bello does too.
"I was obsessed with the hat," Bello says. "Yes. I feel like it's my magic hat. When I put it on, I was this character. It felt right to me. It felt like this is who Jane is. And I got it from my friend Claire. The first night I ever met her, she handed me the hat. She said, 'This belongs to you.' And I put it on, and for me, it's Jane Timoney."
The show's executive producer, Alexandra Cunningham, is also insistent that the hat is okay. She thinks it makes this Prime Suspect very American, different from the British original. "It's very accurate in terms of NYPD detectives," she said "They all seem to wear hats. I don't know whether it's a weather thing or it's one of the only fashion statements they can make, considering how buttoned down they all have to be. But I was surprised by the number of fedoras, especially given it's 2011. So it's Maria's iconic idiosyncrasy."
Still, the hat thing bugs the reporters. Another thing that bugs us is the brutally overt sexism that Timoney faces. Surely it's now out-of-date and overdone in the pilot?
"Sexism isn't gone," Cunningham said. "There are a lot of squads in the NYPD where there are no female detectives at all, still, even though it's 2011." Later she admitted that the sexism will be toned done as the show progresses. Assuming, of course, it lasts more than a few episodes.
There was something peculiar about the entire conversation. On the one hand, the producers of the NBC version wanted to emphasize that this Prime Suspect is new, all-American and distinct from the original. On the other hand, they thought it seemed necessary to point out that it was endorsed by the creator and star of the original.
Bello was asked if she'd studied Mirren's work as Jane Tennison to prepare for this show. Bello said no. She'd seen the original years ago but hadn't sought it out for preparation. She also asked Cunningham to explain about a nice note that arrived recently.
Cunningham said that Lynda LaPlante had written to them giving her seal of approval for the new version.. "She couldn't be happier that Maria is shouldering the character. She is happy it is being modernized, and there's nobody better to do it than Maria."
Undoubtedly LaPlante was in receipt of a cheque, seeing as her creation was being dramatized again, but, never mind.
Cunningham also told us that Mirren, asked at an Oscars party in March, said she was delighted at the choice of Bello to play Jane in a new Prime Suspect.
Mirren was undoubtedly polite, secure in her knowledge that her work as Jane Tennison can never be matched, let alone surpassed, but, again, never mind.
The upshot from the conversation was this - NBC's Prime Suspect always sounded like a cockamamie idea and hardly anyone is going to be convinced otherwise. Never mind the hat. At least Bello isn't wearing it in that bizarre gunslinger photo. Now that would make it all even more cockamamie.