The Commander: The Fraudster

Commander Clare Blake is given a promotion and told to stop micromanaging individual cases. Jane Griffith hires a private investigator and finds her husband Donald Griffith cheating on her with two women, Grace Kandola and Thelma Field. Donald is arrested for fraud. He has been siphoning money from his business. He gets out on bail and is later found dead. Blake is told to take charge of the case. The case is murky with many suspects. The women all have life insurance policies on Donald and there are many investors hurt by his fraud.

This franchise is still not my favorite police procedural. The team is the two leads with a bunch of no name characters who aren't that interesting. This story is a solid whodunit. It moves well with plenty of reveals. I like this slightly better than the others of this series but it's still not the best.

The prior episodes in the franchise were very serious police procedurals, worthy of Lynda LaPlante's oeuvre. This one has elements of farce, despite the subject matter being murder and fraud, it seems less tragic than the crimes in the prior shows.

The other thing is that finally, Clare is not as unsympathetic as in the past. It was always jarring that someone who's worked so hard and put up with so much crap to reach her rank, she was so undisciplined about her love life- the affair with Browning's boyfriend rang particularly false.

It was disappointing that in order to portray a strong woman with an active sex life, LaPlante made Clare too much like a stupid egotistical man with his out of control libido. The corruption and mutual covering up that she engages in was credible - LaPlante's heroines are flawed and very real women- but the seriously stupid affairs were not.

Not as great as the Prime Suspect series, but a cut above most shows, annd Amanda Burton is always worth watching when she's playing a brilliant, iconoclastic woman fighting the usual nonsense and prevailing in a very human way.