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Ye gods, there have been so many.
Anna Carteret as Juliet Bravo, a uniformed PC. She was a brilliant actress, but - and this is a heinous thing - when she was outed as a lesbian, the BBC back in the day sacked her and cancelled the TV series immediately.
Angie Dickinson in Police Woman - a TV series that broke the mould and, I believe, got a lot of young women interested in the possibility that they could become coppers themselves.
Since that time authors have written so many women in as beat cops, mid-rank police and even chiefs of police (Jane Tennyson, for instance) that there are just too many to choose from: but I'll have a stab at some of my favourites. Not literally, or else I'd get arrested.
S. Epatha Merkerson as Lt. van Buren, Law & Order. A steady performance from a brilliant woman.
Kathryn Erbe as Det. Eames, Law & Order: Criminal Intent. The long-suffering sidekick of Det. Robert Goren, Eames is likely to be the cop I'd most like to date.
Mariska Hargitay as Det. Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The female equivalent of the Eternal Singleton, the male hero who shall always remain unmarried, she has the greatest difficulty in landing a regular guy. She tells them she's a cop, and what she does, and they either recoil in terror ... or suddenly display too much interest.
Marg Helgenburger as Catherine Willows, CSI. I like her troubled background. Her late father was a major gangster back in the day; her estranged husband was a thug, a drunk and a junkie, and then he got murdered with his own daughter in the back of his car (and the Goth girl from NCIS in the passenger seat as well!), and while we don't hear much nowadays about Lindsay, we all know that the girl's going to end up getting arrested at some point in the show's future, giving her mother nothing but grief.
Melina Kanakeredes as Det. Stella Bonasera, in CSI: NY. Go ON, girl, ask Mac bloody Taylor out on a date, already! You know you want to, despite the bloody regulations. But you know he's the only man on Earth who will never turn into a frothing lunatic who makes sculptures out of your face and then comes after you with a knife! Geez, take him to bed and be done with it, already!
Cote dePablo as Officer Ziva David, NCIS. Hot, deadly, exotic. A flesh and blood version of Colonel Blackblood from THE ABC Warriors. I don't think poor old Kate Todd would have stood a chance even if Ari Haswari had not managed to put one through Agent Todd's frontal lobes the episode before.
Harriet Walter as Detective Inspector Natalie Chandler, Law & Order: UK. Probably someone you may not have heard much about. The first Flodwick production to leave America, Dick Wolf has long wanted to break the cycle and come up with a British police procedural. And with Law & Order: UK, he did just that. I am so eager to see the rest of the series: I hear that ITV have already signed up for a second season. Go, Flodwick!
I'd probably mention a whole bunch of other female police roles, notably Emily Procter's Calleigh Duquesne in CSI: Miami and before that, Sofia Milos' Yelena Salas from the same show, but I think I'll just stop now. The list's long enough already. The fact that there are so many female police officers in real life, including lesbian police officers (during the last Manchester Pride March, instead of being on the outside trying to force their way in, they were on the inside, coming out!) is a shining testament to the legacy of these fictional characters and the women who have portrayed them down through the years, from the early stories where they had to fight through rampant male chauvinism to the modern day where, like the characters in The Bill, women are accepted as a vital part of the modern police force.
Ye gods, there have been so many.
Anna Carteret as Juliet Bravo, a uniformed PC. She was a brilliant actress, but - and this is a heinous thing - when she was outed as a lesbian, the BBC back in the day sacked her and cancelled the TV series immediately.
Angie Dickinson in Police Woman - a TV series that broke the mould and, I believe, got a lot of young women interested in the possibility that they could become coppers themselves.
Since that time authors have written so many women in as beat cops, mid-rank police and even chiefs of police (Jane Tennyson, for instance) that there are just too many to choose from: but I'll have a stab at some of my favourites. Not literally, or else I'd get arrested.
S. Epatha Merkerson as Lt. van Buren, Law & Order. A steady performance from a brilliant woman.
Kathryn Erbe as Det. Eames, Law & Order: Criminal Intent. The long-suffering sidekick of Det. Robert Goren, Eames is likely to be the cop I'd most like to date.
Mariska Hargitay as Det. Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The female equivalent of the Eternal Singleton, the male hero who shall always remain unmarried, she has the greatest difficulty in landing a regular guy. She tells them she's a cop, and what she does, and they either recoil in terror ... or suddenly display too much interest.
Marg Helgenburger as Catherine Willows, CSI. I like her troubled background. Her late father was a major gangster back in the day; her estranged husband was a thug, a drunk and a junkie, and then he got murdered with his own daughter in the back of his car (and the Goth girl from NCIS in the passenger seat as well!), and while we don't hear much nowadays about Lindsay, we all know that the girl's going to end up getting arrested at some point in the show's future, giving her mother nothing but grief.
Melina Kanakeredes as Det. Stella Bonasera, in CSI: NY. Go ON, girl, ask Mac bloody Taylor out on a date, already! You know you want to, despite the bloody regulations. But you know he's the only man on Earth who will never turn into a frothing lunatic who makes sculptures out of your face and then comes after you with a knife! Geez, take him to bed and be done with it, already!
Cote dePablo as Officer Ziva David, NCIS. Hot, deadly, exotic. A flesh and blood version of Colonel Blackblood from THE ABC Warriors. I don't think poor old Kate Todd would have stood a chance even if Ari Haswari had not managed to put one through Agent Todd's frontal lobes the episode before.
Harriet Walter as Detective Inspector Natalie Chandler, Law & Order: UK. Probably someone you may not have heard much about. The first Flodwick production to leave America, Dick Wolf has long wanted to break the cycle and come up with a British police procedural. And with Law & Order: UK, he did just that. I am so eager to see the rest of the series: I hear that ITV have already signed up for a second season. Go, Flodwick!
I'd probably mention a whole bunch of other female police roles, notably Emily Procter's Calleigh Duquesne in CSI: Miami and before that, Sofia Milos' Yelena Salas from the same show, but I think I'll just stop now. The list's long enough already. The fact that there are so many female police officers in real life, including lesbian police officers (during the last Manchester Pride March, instead of being on the outside trying to force their way in, they were on the inside, coming out!) is a shining testament to the legacy of these fictional characters and the women who have portrayed them down through the years, from the early stories where they had to fight through rampant male chauvinism to the modern day where, like the characters in The Bill, women are accepted as a vital part of the modern police force.
Mariska Hargitay
Date: 2009-07-21 09:24 pm (UTC)