What I’ve learned from watching detective shows

Through ‘Prime Suspect’ to ‘The Bridge’, ‘Department Q’, and countless others, Mary Kate Schilling has toured the world and learned some valuable lessons

Detective chief inspector Jane Tennison was the gateway drug. As played by Helen Mirren on the British series Prime Suspect, she triggered my now-entrenched addiction to international crime dramas.

Tennison — a relentlessly driven, hard-living, sexually indiscriminate female detective (as written by Lynda La Plante) — was exceptional and revolutionary; when the show debuted here in 1992, she had no equivalents on American TV. And Mirren was abetted by an equally riveting co-star: The city of London as I’d never seen it — grubby and bristling with colourful miscreants.