Prime Suspect

Prime Suspect put a senior woman in charge of a murder investigation and made the hostility of her own department part of the case, which is the template The Fall is working in twenty years later. Stella Gibson is the same figure with the argument updated: a detective brought in from outside, better at the job than the men resenting her, whose composure is read as coldness. Both series also spend serious time with the killer rather than treating him as a puzzle. Lynda La Plante's series is the point at which the British crime drama stopped being a whodunnit and started being about institutions.

Vera belongs to the line Prime Suspect opened: a middle-aged woman running a murder squad, whose authority comes from competence rather than from rank or charm, in a northern English setting filmed as a real place rather than as scenery. The variation is temperament. Tennison's career is a running fight; Vera Stanhope is already established and uses being underestimated as a method. The debt is that the character exists as a commissionable lead at all, which was not true of British television drama before 1991.