Price to Pay (1)

Jane Tennison has been passed over for murder inquiries for years. It takes a colleague's sudden death to put her in charge of one. DCI John Shefford, popular with everyone, dies of a heart attack mid-case, and his inquiry lands on the Met's newest Detective Chief Inspector, a rank no woman had reached before her. The victim is a young girl, badly mutilated, her hands tied behind her back. Jane suspects George Marlow. Her new team suspects her.

The first hour shows how the whole series will work. Jane points out that Shefford misidentified the victim, and the room turns on her; one officer accuses her of attacking the reputation of a dead comrade. A few of the boys try to sabotage their new leader in the quiet, official way the Met did things back then. She had gone in expecting bad attitudes from superiors and peers alike; the job was simply to get on with it. Jane refuses to rise to any of it. She does the job, brooks no nonsense, and by the end of the episode a couple of officers have started to look at her differently. The inquiry itself offers no such progress. Marlow keeps his distance, and the case file keeps producing questions nobody wants asked.

Lynda La Plante wrote it and Christopher Menaul directed. Helen Mirren's Tennison holds the room together, with Tom Bell as DS Bill Otley, John Benfield as DSU Michael Kernan, Zoë Wanamaker as Moyra Henson and Craig Fairbrass as DI Frank Burkin. Jack Ellis, Mossie Smith, John Forgeham as Shefford and John Bowe as the softly watchful George Marlow fill out the ranks.

The murder will get solved eventually. But the fight in the Incident Room is the one worth watching, and the show knows it. It never once pretends the two are separate.