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By JOYCE MILLMAN

Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison of the London police has become a PBS stalwart, right up there with Rumpole, Inspector Morse and Poirot. But the "Prime Suspect" saga, which continues on Sunday, February 11 (check your local TV times) with the two-hour installment "Inner Circles," stands out like a sore thumb in the company of those genteel geezers.

Gloomy and gritty, "Prime Suspect" and its testy heroine forge the link between '60s British kitchen-sink realism like "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and such current American TV noir as "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Law & Order."

Maybe Tennison is so popular in the States, with its glut of cop shows, because she's the great, ballsy, intense female detective American TV has never had. Cagney and Lacey were too hammeringly obvious, the various women in Steven Bochco cop shows too one-dimensional (and always underused). But Helen Mirren's ambitious Tennison is a brooding, obsessive workaholic, a female version of Andre Braugher's Pembleton in "Homicide" (a show that, by the way, owes a lot of its ambience -- the incessantly bleating squad room phone, the dogged focus on procedure, the unsqueamish detectives' regular visits to the morgue -- to "Prime Suspect").

Regular viewers of "Homicide" (or "NYPD Blue" or "Law & Order") may get the feeling they've seen "Inner Circles" before. Its big theme -- animosity between social classes -- may be hot stuff in Britain, but it's the subtext of practically every American cop show nowadays. Tennison is in charge of a murder investigation in suburban Hadley Green. The manager of the country club has been found dead in his ransacked house; the two suspects are speed-addicted kids from the nearby subsidized housing projects. However, Tennison's investigation turns up evidence of real-estate fraud, blackmail and murder among the pillars of suburban society.

Written by Eric Deacon and directed by Sarah Pia Anderson, "Inner Circles" is "Prime Suspect" spinning its wheels, keeping the franchise warm until a juicier case comes along. Still, it's got Tennison, and she doesn't disappoint.

Tennison remains the most fallible of heroines; she's stubborn, serenely egotistical and often insensitive. But she faces her sexist, old-boy-network workplace nemeses with absolute, regal confidence. She may be a mess, but she's her own mess, thank you very much. "Prime Suspect" gives Tennison the leeway American TV has always afforded similarly driven male characters -- to be simultaneously brilliant and difficult. And the first three "Prime Suspect" miniseries remained refreshingly non-judgmental about the gulf between Tennison's detective smarts and her complete inability to get a life, conveying her arid off-duty existence with a restraint bordering on clinical detachment.

Clinical detachment can be a snooze, though -- ask anyone who dozed through CBS's shortlived "Prime Suspect" rip-off "Under Suspicion," with its arty-smarty, expressionless performance from star Karen Sillas. But then, "Prime Suspect" has the advantage of Helen Mirren, the most radiantly intelligent and mesmerizingly un-self-conscious actress alive.

In 1994's "Prime Suspect 3," Tennison discovered she was pregnant as the result of a sputtering affair. Her turmoil may have gone unspoken for much of the miniseries but Mirren let you know by a flicker of sadness or a shadow of worry that it was dominating the character's thoughts.

Late in the miniseries, there was a stunning scene in which Tennison, in her office, crisply made arrangements for the abortion, then, with her back to the camera, uncharacteristically broke down in sobs, mopped herself up and went back to work. This was an uncommonly realistic TV depiction of the complex emotions masked by the benign phrase "right to choose." Tennison's decision was undoubtedly, for her, the right one, but that doesn't mean it won't haunt her.

Beginning with 1995's two-hour "The Lost Child," "Prime Suspect's" detachment started to wobble. Tennison was depicted in more pathetic tableaus. She was no longer able to deny the toll of remaining emotionally shut down 12 hours a day (lest the lads think she's a weakling). She was alone, and lonely. In "Inner Circles," she's hitting the wine pretty hard and she doesn't even seem to go home; she's always shown at work, or on her way to work, or lingering in her car or the pub after work wishing she could go back to work.

"Prime Suspect" hasn't sunk so low as to encourage viewers to tsk-tsk over Tennison's choices yet, but the writers seem intent on throwing as many ironies at Jane as possible.

Consider the heavy-handed set-up of "The Lost Child," which began with a few brief scenes of Tennison at the abortion clinic. She hurries back to the station house, clearly hoping to escape into her work, but is instead immediately called upon to head the search for an abducted infant. At every turn, she's confronted by something -- a baby's toy, a mother's grief -- that forces her to face her own lost chance for motherhood.

The lost child thread is picked up again, more subtly, in "Inner Circles" when Tennison is interrogating a bedraggled teenaged waif and she suddenly reaches out and tenderly smoothes his hair. It's an impulsive, maternal action and Mirren makes it seem poignantly unconscious. What woman hasn't daydreamed about the road not taken?

In that moment, Tennison accepts that detachment is a lie, that the choices she has made in her quest for career fulfillment have consequences and to disconnect from consequences doesn't make her more equal to men, it just makes her less human. In "Inner Circles," Tennison begins piecing together an Identikit portrait of a familiar stranger -- herself.