Has it really been 2 months since we posted the first season of Prime Suspect? Oops... In any case, here's the second season of this brilliant character study in impossible-to-find DVD. I'll try to get Season 3 up soon, probably in another two months. And keep an eye out for "The Street" some time in the next year...
From Appelate Judge Mike Pinsky at DVD Verdict:
Female cops never seem to fair well on American television. Of course, there was Pepper Anderson, Angie Dickinson's tough but sensitive '70s detective in Police Woman. Then we had Cagney and Lacey. Lifetime Network has the estrogen-driven The Division, but that has gone almost unnoticed by the general public. You might notice that none of these shows ran concurrently. There seems to be an unwritten rule on American television that viewers can only handle one successful female cop at a time. The blue glass ceiling keeps women from being anything more than an anomaly in television law enforcement.
If Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) had her way, that rule would be history. Well, to be honest, Tennison is no feminist, at least in the philosophical sense. She is a careerist, driven to succeed at the expense of friends, lovers, and even her own happiness. At the beginning of Prime Suspect 2, Tennison is wrapping up a brief fling with Detective Sergeant Bob Oswalde (Colin Salmon), who seems a little appalled at Tennison's cavalier attitude toward their affair. He wants to be more than just her "black stud," and she wants to just get back to her job.
After all the fighting between Tennison and her staff during the George Marlow case (see Prime Suspect 1 for details), Jane has managed to whip her team into fighting shape. Good thing, too. A decomposing corpse has just been dug up behind the flat of an immigrant family in a section of London whose racial tensions make 1960s Watts look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Jane's boss, Mike Kernan (John Benfield), will accept no mistakes: he is up for promotion. And if he moves up, his job as superintendent might be open for Tennison.
In the second installment of the riveting Prime Suspect series, writer Allan Cubitt steps in for creator Lynda La Plant to craft a mystery with a social conscience. The shift in focus would be successful enough that all subsequent stories in the series would take on sociological texture (as opposed to the fairly traditional serial killer case Tennison solved in the first story). Tennison's struggle as a woman in a profession dominated by condescending and corrupt men is still in evidence though. But now the series throws in pornography, police brutality, and racial politics into the mix.
As Tennison pursues the white former tenant of the flat (Tom Watson), Kernan puts Bob Oswalde on the case in the hopes of diffusing some of the anger in the heavily Afro-Caribbean neighborhood where the murder took place. Oswalde quickly latches onto his own prime suspect, the twitchy teen next door (Fraser James), who clearly has a connection to the deceased girl. Oswalde is just as ambitious as Jane is, and just as conscious of the stares of his co-workers (his over race, hers over gender). Perhaps this is why they both desire and repel one another: they are too alike for any relationship to be less than a firestorm. Worse, working against one another leads to a nearly disastrous string of errors that causes the case to spiral out of control.
Technical Information:
Title: Prime Suspect
Season: 2
Year: 1992
Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size:
Disc 1- 3.74 GB
Disc 2- 3.90 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~ 8500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97
Audio: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: cc-English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
Disc 1 Megaupload Links
Disc 2 Megaupload Links
Season 1
Season 3