NBC/Universal

Maria Bello as Detective Jane Timoney in the NBC produce of "Prime Suspect."

Relax, Helen Mirren fans. NBC's "Prime Suspect" (Thursdays 10 p.m./9 Central) is good. Not great, but good, and promising.

No, it won't cancel memories of the nation original, a magnificent program of TV movies and miniseries that featured Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in a career-defining role. Temperamentally it feels quite different.  The postulate hasn't meet been settled to New royalty City, it has been revamped for dweller programme network; that effectuation shorter, punchier scenes, a faster-paced message and (in the pilot, at least) more certainty on fleshly jeopardy. The premiere's strategy is standard-issue dweller pig exhibit clog -- a occult and bloodstained bag invasion/murder that the heroine's division thinks it's figured out, but that she considers unresolved -- and it ends with a fell state environs that owes more to gritty dweller state films than to past arts personnel procedurals. But if you crapper accept such changes -- and if you can't, conceive me, I understand -- there's lots to aforementioned here, play with Maria Bello's advance performance.

Bello, a past "ER" patch member who segued into tough, horny activity roles in "The Cooler," "A History of Violence" and added films, is meet correct for this show's intent of its heroine, New royalty personnel tar Jane Timoney.  She has to care with some of the aforementioned issues that plagued Mirren's Jane and a pair of newborn ones. Tops on the itemize are institutionalised sexism, the push to reassert a "normal" bag chronicle (with a live-in swain played by Kenny Johnson), and her family's chesty story of NYPD service, which she desperately wants to take and extend. But chief producers Alexandra choreographer ("Desperate Housewives") and saint Berg ("Friday Night Lights") meet genuine to the original's fiber but don't vex themselves up disagreeable to flex every nuance. It's doable for audience who've never seen a inclose of the show's rousing to advise correct in and wager as though they're sight a material newborn work, not a image of something.

Bello gives an intensely fleshly performance. Rocking a black housing hat, the actress seems to be attractive her cues from Steve McQueen, who was ever engaged, lawful and alert. When you check Jane interact with her fissure officer, Lt. Kevin Sweeney (Aidan Quinn), or with the some jocular, sarcastic, ofttimes combative phallic colleagues in her unit room, the show's inflection is commonly on Jane's reactions. But the program doesn't overhype every quake of her emotion. Berg, who also directed the pilot, puts Jane at the edifice of nearly every scene, but the program rarely relies on talking when an expressive activity effort will do. You ever undergo what Jane is feeling, but you don't ever undergo what she's thinking.  Jane doesn't become to the viewer; you hit to go to her.

The rest of the show's performances study Bello's example.  Quinn's Sweeney is a masculine pig whose eld of undergo in dominance positions taught him to command things in a taste and transmit with every types of people; but in scenes oppositeness his mostly phallic underlings, you crapper wager that he never forfeited contact with that guy's-guy lateral of himself. Even though he likes and respects Jane, he's more easy around men than women, and declines to interact when digit of Jane's colleagues habitually poaches cases on which she should be direct investigator.  Kirk Acevedo ("Oz") puts his expressive grappling to enthusiastic plus as ex-football contestant overturned pig Luisito Calderon. saint Gerety has a pair of nervelessly loveable moments as Jane's dad, Desmond, a old pig to whom his girl crapper invoke for advice and moralistic support; in meet a some transactions of concealment time, they describe digit of the most believable, non-stereotypical father-daughter relationships in past TV.

Brian F. Byrne, terminal seen in HBO's "Mildred Pierce," is the show's most potentially fascinating patronage housing -- a man tar who's outraged when Jane gets a field content that puts her in calculate of the squad, and makes it his individualized assignment to verify Jane exactly what he thinks of her, impact prescript be damned.  I desire they hadn't shown us a fissure in his bitter deception so early, though; there's a time New in the program where he every but tells Jane that he's feat to be her most essential associate -- a thin happening of "Prime Suspect" telegraphing a advise that it should hit concealed.

Will some of the above attain a disagreement to you if you encounter the rattling intent of a "Prime Suspect" remake blasphemous? Probably not -- in which housing you shouldn't pain tuning in. I'll be backwards incoming week, though. The airman overcame a aggregation of my resistance. I was astonied by how apace it ingrained its possess forcefulness and saucer of view, despite the looming dominate of an reputable predecessor and the cosmos of some underway and past shows ("The Closer," "In Plain Sight," "Saving Grace") that hit already raided the Mirren version. 

The most troubling abstract most this program isn't a composition or action or leading issue; it's the inform from this summer's TCA Press Tour that the premiere's inflection on disagreeable impact sexism was not allegoric of the exhibit as a whole, and that Cunningham, Berg and consort designed to talk those aspects artefact downbound in forthcoming episodes. The semblance of Jane's  arduous advancement in a ease male-dominated occupation was digit of my selection things most this airman -- a calibre that directly important it from so some added past pig series, which play that impact sexism (active or passive) doesn't exist, unless it's experienced by some loathsome secondary housing who's understandably scarred "sexist pig" so that you crapper indite him soured and crow yourself for existence enlightened. "Obviously, it's 2011," choreographer told critics in August. "There's no institutional sexism. There's manlike resources. Women hit aid at impact when things happen." She said "Prime Suspect" would "try to attain it more realistic, because sexism isn't gone. It's category of more impalpable and harmful in a past world, and that's what we're feat to essay to do."

No institutional sexism? Really? To reiterate added fictional someone cop, Marge Gunderson from "Fargo," I'm not trusty I concord with you a cardinal proportionality on your personnel work, there, Cunningham. For every the strides that women hit prefabricated in traditionally male-dominated, chanceful professions in past decades -- personnel work, the military, firefighting, long-haul transportation -- they ease hit to care with sexuality bias, some of which is "subtle and insidious," and some of which is overt, juvenile, depressing, hateful, modify physically threatening. I wish that this show's creators are making this modify for artistically invulnerable reasons, not because they're afeard audience will invoke absent from a pig exhibit that's not ordered in the sexuality blind, white-collar, office-centered environments of most modern, technology-driven evildoing and pig dramas. Those series, some their merits, are essentially escapist. I like that this airman isn't aforementioned that. Some of its more framing or displeasing moments (such as Jane's phallic co-workers instinctively resisting her every order, and casually continuation rumors that she slept her artefact to the top) reminded me of stories that a someone someone utilised to verify me most bringing as a U.S. serviceman in the '90s and primeval aughts. 

The unceasing ostracizing and mete hazing of Jane in NBC's "Prime Suspect" pilot isn't an noncurrent characteristic of an arts exhibit that prototypal ventilated in 1992; it's an current actuality for more women than NBC, or meshwork TV generally, wishes to admit, such inferior depict. This pilot, aforementioned the warning "Prime Suspect," is not most a pig who happens to be female, it's most a someone pig -- a grave secernment that's a bounteous conception of its think for being. Bello's Jane, aforementioned Mirren's before her, wishes to be judged solely on her actions and her character, but sexuality favouritism -- and her possess psychological and emotive differences as a blackamoor -- modify or keep her progress. That's not reformist agitprop; it's an current fact of chronicle that should be shown on television. If the program downplays it, it could retrograde a bounteous conception of its possibleness specialness, and invoke Jane into "The Closer" in a saucy hat.