Prime Suspect 1973: Jane Tennison deserves a whole lot better than this

Televised policiers owe much to Prime Suspect. In Jane Tennison (originally played by Helen Mirren) it created an indelible icon, a flawed, brilliant detective railing against institutional prejudice, incompetence and people calling her "ma’am", before any of those attributes had become clichés. Crime drama has since moved on, but its influence lingers. And while you can't blame ITV for returning to the well, you’d hope the broadcaster might have treated one of its towering achievements with a little more care and ambition.

Prime Suspect 1973 joined 22-year-old WPC Jane Tennison (Stefanie Martini) as she faced misogyny and malpractice while trying to subtly expand her brief beyond making tea and writing up traffic violations. A handily timed murder presented the perfect opportunity.

The case, like the excellent production design, was 1970s London to a fault. A murdered prostitute (what else?) turned out to have been the daughter of respectable middle-class types, while a grizzled gangland kingpin (Alun Armstrong) butted heads with other wrong ’uns while plotting a bank robbery from the inside. Life on Mars – also set in 1973 – conjured more compelling mysteries and characters, with greater insight and wit, all inside single episodes rather than sprawling six-parters like this.

Certainly, you can't fault Lynda La Plante's instincts. Having bailed on Prime Suspect half way through its 15-year run, she also walked away from this production, reportedly over casting concerns. To be fair to Martini, she could have lodged a similar protest over much of the writing. Based on La Plante's own bestseller Tennison, the script gave her precious little to work with beyond a perfunctory glimpse into her home life, relying far too much on prior knowledge of Tennison's future. As she showed in ITV's recent Trollope adaptation, Doctor Thorne, Martini can convey vulnerability and naivety with consummate skill. It's the hint of inner steel that was missing, but then even Helen Mirren would have struggled to breathe much life into material this inert.

Elsewhere, the casting was optimistic at best and misguided at worst, with Jane's superior officer D I Bradfield (Sam Reid) a particular collector's item for aficionados of sullen pouting. Prime Suspect 1973, however, didn't really tell us anything about, past or present, that we didn't already know, and with such a workaday narrative at its heart, there wasn't much else to cling on to. With the likes of Line of Duty, Unforgotten and a reinvigorated Broadchurch on the television beat, Prime Suspect 1973 looks not just obsolete but unwittingly so as well.