TV REVIEW : ‘Suspect’: An Arresting Thriller on ‘Mystery!’

Diana Rigg may never supplant Alistair Cooke. Yet one could make a case for “Mystery!” having eclipsed “Masterpiece Theatre” as the centerpiece drama series on PBS. And then help support it by citing “Prime Suspect,” the crackling good three-parter from Britain’s Granada Television opening at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15.

The mystery in this new “Mystery!”--and it does keeps you guessing--centers on the identity of a particularly monstrous serial killer. Even more intriguing, though, is the bitter, no-quarter warfare between the fiercely ambitious female police detective leading the investigation and her resentful male colleagues. The sexual harassment is ugly and vivid.

Helen Mirren, an actress of subtlety whose work is consistently arresting, is London-based detective chief inspector Jane Tennison, named to head the murder probe on a fluke after previously being passed over for big cases because of her gender.

Immediately, she is victimized by the department’s rigid, old-boy provincialism, undercut by her boss and sabotaged by a particularly musty and mean-spirited male subordinate. She’s relentless, though, and as her obsession with the case and her job grow, so do her troubles on the home front, where her husband tires of being passed over by Tennison for her police work.

Writer Lynda La Plante and director Chris Menaul pull the strings ever tighter, creating a tingly, suspenseful four hours (the premiere is two, the subsequent installments one each), building toward a neat little twist ending.

Mirren keeps the complex, nervous, neurotic, driving, chain-smoking Tennison coiled inside a cocoon of toughness. This is a formidable woman who must fight for every inch of authority and respect she acquires; the lines in her face are a map of her career wars. Menaul’s lingering close-ups reveal the tautness.

Meanwhile, Tom Bell is marvelously vile as her nasty police nemesis, and ever-inventive Zoe Wanamaker is irresistibly weird as the common-law wife of the primary suspect.

If not “Masterpiece Theatre,” “Masterpiece Mystery.”