Det. Supt. Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) is 54 and being pushed to retire. A woman is found tortured and killed in a basement. Tennison pushes aside subordinate DCI Simon Finch to head the investigation. With former flame Robert West's help, she dives into the murky history of the Balkan war. The victim and her sister Jasmina Belkic are illegal Bosnian Muslim immigrants. Finch suspects Jasmina's petty criminal Kasim and his connections in the underworld. Tennison zeroes in on Serb security guard Duscan Zigic as the prime suspect. His lawyer brings in Milan Lukic to translate. Jasmina reveals a connection a decade earlier during the war.It's seven years since series five. This one is a three hour two-parter. The production is one step up from the earlier series. Even the autopsy looks better. Helen Mirren continues to shine as Tennison. The story is able to take a couple of turns in the second part to keep the interest. They're not shocking or out of left field but they are interesting. This is one of the better procedurals in the Prime Suspect franchise.

I'm at a loss to understand why this episode scores so highly. To my eye this is an astoundingly dull entry in the series. Most of the episodes suffer to some extent by being overly lengthy but this one in particular is stretched beyond the bounds of reason. It might have made a decent 90 minute programme but three hours is an insane length for this material. Every point in the procedure is dragged out to such an extent that it doesn't matter if you fall asleep at any point because the plot will not have advanced when you wake up half an hour later. I'm a big fan of Prime Suspect but lets not pretend it is without faults. This has hardly any of the characters we have seen before and the new team Tennyson manages are exceptionally dull. Even the sub-plot of how she is oppressed, this time by being too old, has worn thin. The premise is a good one but the direction is pedestrian and the script is poor. This is the only Prime Suspect episode that should be avoided.

With this sixth season, PBS promoted the "Prime Suspect" movie series from its "Mystery!" block to the "Masterpiece Theatre" one. This would suggest it's some sort of highbrow program, but no. How the mighty have fallen. PBS has come a long way from David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and the earlier seasons of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. A long way down. It was bad enough back in 2002 with the sensationalized adaptation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" with Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. That production gave us lovingly lingering shots of Holmes taking drugs during his case, a police officer slowly sinking to his death in quicksand, and quick cuts of a corpse on a morgue table post-autopsy, with a terrified expression frozen on its face and big stitches running across its body (none of these things were in the book, a telling sign of how PBS decided to sensationalize the story). Then there was the Inspector Lynley mystery whose first scene showed the bloodied corpses of a dog and a decapitated man, both killed with an axe. I quit those "films" after a little while, not wanting to waste any more time. I did the same with "Prime Suspect 6." The critics who are too kind to this series on account of Queen Helen Mirren needn't bother with their paeans. Maybe Mirren really is a great actress. Maybe Denzel Washington is too, but that doesn't mean we have to praise "John Q." As for "Prime Suspect 6," it would seem that PBS has now gone all the way and started putting exploitation flicks on their channel.I didn't catch this show when it premiered on TV, but recently borrowed it on DVD. Things started off poorly enough with the usual cop drama clichés. Someone discovers a corpse brutalized in the fashion of the series, which leads to police procedural scenes that manage to be both busy and boring – lots of trucks, barricades, and investigators in blue scrubs. We also get the burnt-out cops, office politics, "naturalistic" acting, comic relief supporting characters, camaraderie among the lower ranks, and a world-weary coroner who provides further wry humor.Even worse, the show doesn't just want to be an entertaining mystery story; it wants to Make a Point. Not that this is a new thing with "Prime Suspect," which in the past has looked at racism, corruption, etc. This year's themes are war crimes, refugees, and the suffering of the underclass (mostly immigrant racial/ethnic minorities) who provide cheap labor in thankless jobs. We watch a stuffy English politician lecture about illegal immigrant criminals "swamping" England and its undermanned police force. There's a tour of the upstairs-downstairs world of a hotel where the white, suited manager works on the posh first floor, but the basement is full of ethnic types stuck with the real dirty work. A black man who works in said basement reports how the Bosnian murder victim worked 12-hour shifts 6 days a week. We are also told this woman was tortured with ritual cigarette burns many years ago, just as she was right before she died.The film pays lip service to the dignity of the victim when a detective lectures his subordinate not to degrade the corpse with jokes. The filmmakers are such hypocrites, for they have no qualms about filming a later scene of this woman's autopsy featuring right-up-in-front shots of the corpse's torso and throat skin peeled wide open to reveal the insides in great detail. Showing a stitched-up corpse like in "Baskervilles" wasn't enough. The woman is made into a grotesquerie show, and the viewers are invited to gape at the lurid spectacle of her cut-up body.This is what really finished it for me. First we're looking at a mundane scene somewhere else, and suddenly the camera jump cuts to the autopsy. The filmmakers were obviously going for shock effect. They should know better; this sort of grotesque imagery is not something that should casually show up on TV, and can deeply disturb people, myself included. The above-mentioned "John Q" used the exact same sort of crotch-grabbing when it made a jump cut to a heart transplant surgery, followed by close-ups of the chest cavity.How to stick with the movie after this insult? How absurd it would be for the viewers to remain at their schooldesks like good children and keep listening to the "serious" social commentary (let alone the mystery, which to the filmmakers is secondary) when it comes alongside gore effects in cheapie horror flick tradition.Shame on director Tom Hooper, producers David Boulter and Rebecca Eaton, writer Peter Berry, and the other filmmakers, and shame on PBS and WGBH.

Is this the best of the lot? Those who've seen all of them talk a lot about 1 and 2. I haven't seen them yet. I'm tempted to order all seven on DVD.This is a new format this time. Some things have changed but some things stayed the same. Again it's an intriguing case woven expertly in the lay-up by the writer and the filming team. And in this one perhaps more than in the others I've seen the cinematography is fantastic. Angles as if they're coming out of a Kubrick classic. There is much eye candy in here.So Jane Tennison is back - and she's battling the same bad guys as ever. This time she's surrounded on all sides by the same type of motley crew: the ambitious career types, the slacker types, the mens club types - you know the drill.But the lady's acting never gets boring. Mirren brings something special, something extra to whatever she's in.This one will take you on an exotic journey. And it's not a walk in the park either. If 5 was one of the most intense (of those I've seen) then 6 can't be far behind.As always, on top of all the other excellent work done on this series, you have the star. She's inimitable.