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I promise this is the last one of these entries for now, but I have some thoughts that didn't quite fit into either of the previous two, one more it is. Again, this entry involves pop culture critique along political lines, and if that's not your thing, you should skip it.

You may remember when I said that I would probably only watch Prime Suspect episodes when I was in the mood for a cop show. That hasn't been my actual approach. I have, instead, watched every episode. I still don't care about it as a cop show; I find their cases very uninteresting. But I find everything else that happens around the edges of the show fascinating. There are two particular points I want to talk about in comparison to my previous two entries.

First, the approach to cultural practices. In the Halloween episode of Hawaii Five-0, their crime scene is a sacred Hawaiian burial ground, which they have to have permission and the blessing of a priest before they enter it. Danny is so completely dismissive of this and wanders into it himself, and then dismisses the bad things that happen to him as not being a curse. Everyone on the show takes him to task for it, but he never changes his mind or realizes he was wrong.

In episode five of Prime Suspect, a missing Hispanic girl is found dead. The episode starts with the people of the neighborhood pressed up against a barrier the police have set up and yelling at them for not having found her/not caring because she's not a white girl. One of them yells at Reg (who is white) while shaking something at him, and Velerio (who is Black, but grew up in this particular neighborhood) tells him she put a curse on him. Reg is cranky and skeptical about it. To put this in perspective, if you offered Reg candy out of a jar you keep your desk for the sole purpose of offering people candy, he would be cranky and skeptical about it. Bad things keep happening to Reg, though, and Velerio tells him he's located a bruja. In the end, when he's had enough, Velerio says, "You ready to see the bruja now?" and Reg agrees. Furthermore, he is respectful - in a very Reg sort of way, which means not saying anything even though he has a somewhat sour look on his face - when the bruja's approach to taking the curse off of him involves spitting alcohol onto him.

The Prime Suspect episode also has a part in the middle where Jane needs people to sweep the park and is told she can't have them because they're needed to find a missing pretty, rich, white girl. The show doesn't even leave it there; Jane says, "You are making their point for them. You couldn't do it better," and her Captain backs her up and tells her he brought that up when he got his orders.

Second, although she was very much in the background, this show had a neutrally presented fat woman. In episode four, Jane ends up in a communal changing room. Behind her is a fat woman in her bra. She isn't there as a joke, and she isn't there for us to be disgusted by. She's just a woman, trying on clothes and disapproving of the way Jane is treating the witness. Yes, I would prefer to have neutrally presented fat characters in the foreground, but this is an interesting start and not something I've seen elsewhere. Watching for these background moments is part of what makes this show so interesting to me.

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Ruth Sadelle Alderson

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