Bloodhound: Helen Mirren in 'Prime Suspect'.

In the great video store in heaven, the shelf of Prime Suspect episodes is infinitely long. After all, who could demand more from a television mystery than this steely British police procedural, shot with a lightning-rod attentiveness to detail and atmosphere and show-casing one of our era's great actresses, Helen Mirren? Here on earth, the chronicles of London detective Jane Tennison have numbered all too few: in the decade after its 1992 premiere in England and later America, the series clocked a mere five episodes, following Detective Chief Inspector Tennison's nerve-wracking murder investigations and her excruciating run-ins with misogynistic colleagues. This past April, PBS ponied up a sixth installment, and now the increasingly talked-about cable channel BBC America is re-broadcasting most of the series, starting August 9, as part of its Mystery Mondays lineup. (The whole series is also available on DVD.)

There was an unhappy period in my past--occasioned by my first full-time job after graduate school--when episodes of Prime Suspect provided my only respite from a sea of misery. Fortunately, my life has improved radically since then (a wonderful invention, time!), but I still find Tennison's exploits utterly absorbing, and to judge by the more than fourteen international television awards the program has received, I am far from alone. To credit the performances and the complexity of the characterizations risks stating the obvious. As conceived by the writer Lynda La Plante, Prime Suspect teems with personalities so seemingly genuine that they appear to have waltzed in right off the street. Take such subsidiary characters as the pilot's Moyra Henson, a reputed serial killer's wife played by the creepily pixie-faced Zoe Wanamaker. Shifting from tough-as-nails denunciations of the cops to an eerie, pitiable breakdown in an interrogation room, the actress suggests how effectively humans can will themselves to overlook evil. Or consider episode 3's portraits of Jason and Anthony, two fragile young men who were sexually abused as children: the contrast between the way these overgrown boys speak--one with barely controlled stoicism, his eyes downcast, his lips pursed, the other with a bold stare and an unhinged smirk--speaks volumes about psychological variety, and the different effect one experience can have on two individuals.

And then there's Mirren, who ranges through bravado, vulnerability, annoyance, aggressiveness, and a spectrum of other humors on a second-by-second basis, capturing the hardboiled Tennison's moods and energies with pitch-perfect mannerisms--like her manic, bellicose gum-chewing at a point in the saga when her character has given up smoking. As a strong female struggling along in a man's world, Tennison appeals to feminist instincts, but she is not, to tell the truth, a wholly admirable person. Uncompromising, self-centered, sometimes rude, she can evince a complete disregard for other people's feelings, on one occasion ruining her frail elderly father's birthday party when it happens to coincide with her own appearance on a TV newscast.

Her flaws, shrewdly and subtly highlighted by the program's smart scriptwriters, dovetail with Prime Suspect's pessimistic social vision, with its scrutiny of prostitution, cynical streetkids, pornography, pedophilia rings, and corruption in the police force. This is a series that descends from the tradition of hard-boiled detective novels, a genre that, as literary critic George Grella once observed, is "influenced by the Puritan imagination" and obsessed with "the pervasive blight of sin, a society fallen from grace, an endless struggle against evil." Since its obsession runs on this track, Prime Suspect dwells more on process than result, more on the symptoms of the fallen state than on the possibility of solving crime and putting the blighted world to rights. Each episode glories in the procedure of the police station: the cluttered desks where harried detectives answer ringing phones, the bulletin boards covered with photos and diagrams, the claustrophobic offices where Tennison's superiors attempt to intimidate her, or plot their own promotions.

Admittedly, the delights of the mystery format always revolve around the logistics of the chase, but Prime Suspect, more than most detective tales, broods on the frustration factor. "Do you have any handcuffs?" one of Tennison's right-hand men gasps to another in episode 3 as the two of them, dressed in drag for an undercover operation, wrestle a murderous thug to the ground. "Take a wild guess!" snaps the second cop, dressed, like his mate, in a slinky drag-queen outfit equipped with neither holsters nor pockets. The moment is typical. Surrounded by police-department spies and kingmakers intent on power plays and cover-ups--or else simply bent on thwarting a woman detective's career--Tennison and her helpers spend a good deal of energy in Sisyphean labors, and the rest of the time they battle a phenomenon that's a major tip-off to the fallenness of the world: aggravation.

It's aggravation that motivates Tennison's signature tic: running her fingers exasperatedly through her short, faded blonde hair. Even the title of the series points to discomfiture: the saga is called Prime Suspect because in the pilot installment, and often throughout its sequels, the heroine's challenge is not to locate the culprit, whom she has already tentatively pinpointed, but to muster the legal proof necessary to reel him in (in episode 6, that mission even involved trekking to a war-crimes scene in Bosnia). Justice and the law do not go hand in hand, and the former must often wait on the latter, sometimes indefinitely.

It's all the more easy to identify with Tennison, in other words, because her story exemplifies the vexations of day-to-day life and work: the way, whenever you've gone undercover in drag, you always find you need the handcuffs you left in your trousers--well, more realistically for most of us, the way you reach the bus stop just after the bus has left; or the way the office fax machine insists on running out of toner; or the way it takes twenty minutes to clean the spam out of your e-mail in-box after a weekend.

Surely the only person who can't delight in the success of Prime Suspect--that parable about daily frustration--is Mirren herself, who has acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared in numerous films, but who is now most closely linked in the public mind with a television cop show. While the rest of us think wistfully of that Blockbuster in the sky, stocked with episode after episode of Tennison capers, Mirren must surely be thinking that heaven can wait.