Girl Power

BY ANDREA CIRILLO

writer bio

Last Monday, I attended a hometown premiere for the new TNT series, Rizzoli & Isles.  The town was Camden, Maine, where Tess Gerritsen—creator of the characters that inspired the show—lives with her husband Jacob on the salty shores of the Atlantic. This isn't an everyday occurrence in Camden, although a good handful of well-known writers, artists and musicians live there, and the town came out in full force to show its support.  Hosted by Gerritsen, the celebration began with cocktails on the wide white porch of the Camden Harbor Inn (blue drinks in homage to Rizzoli and pink to Isles) and moved on via trolley to the Camden Opera House, a glamorous old world venue (c. 1894) that has showcased music, movies, and even “traveling shows” with top-tier performers like Mae (“Come up and see me some time”) West and Tallulah Bankhead.

This is the first television adaptation for Tess Gerritsen, who has written a string of bestselling crime novels, many featuring the two characters that form the basis of this tv series: Jane Rizzoli, a homicide detective, and Maura Isles, a medical examiner.  Not a cop or ME herself, Tess’s background is nonetheless totally legit for this arena, as she practiced medicine before turning to medical suspense-related fiction.  She's unflappably at home with eviscerated bodies, maggot-infested organs and corpses resulting from foul play or natural causes.  And she knows what it’s like to go toe-to-toe with testosterone in a male-oriented field, often relying on relationships with other women to make it through the day.  As she says, “We don’t go to work like good soldiers and tackle perps exactly like the guys. We have concerns that men don’t have and aren’t even aware of. Those of us who work in male-dominated fields (and I was one of them during my early days as a doctor) struggle to be “like the guys” in so many ways. Our mantra is: ‘don’t show weakness. Be strong. Work twice as hard.’ But when we leave work and get home, we fall back into who we are: women. And that means families, troublesome moms and boyfriends, getting dinner on the table. And, yes, maybe drooling over a new pair of high heels. We live double lives, and our male colleagues get to see only one side of us.”

The woman-in-a-man’s-world dynamic is also familiar to the show’s writer and executive producer, Janet Tamaro.  She bucks the Hollywood tide in a sea of suits and is anxious to offer the kind of television that's rarely seen in prime time.  Via Tamaro's script, Angie Harmon’s Rizzoli is tomboyish and rumpled, true to Gerritsen’s novels.  (Ok, she’s a lot better looking than originally written, but we’re not expecting miracles here.)  She’s not just a cop; she’s a female cop in a homicide unit, and the only person who totally gets her is another woman (played by Sasha Alexander), the medical examiner she relies on every day to uncover the bodily evidence to catch the creeps and psychos preying on the good citizens of Boston.

At early screenings of the show—in cities around the country and here at a jam-packed outdoor event in Times Square—85% of the audiences were female. In Philadelphia, a group of well-dressed female police officers attended and one of them, slightly miffed,  asked why Angie Harmon down-played her obvious assets on the show.  (I guess she hadn't read the books, or she would've understood and appreciated the verisimilitude.)  But they loved the way Angie's Jane wasn’t afraid to jump a suspect in the woods without waiting for backup. They loved that she kicked ass instead of expecting a male cop ride in to save the day.  Gerritsen didn't set out to write feminist literature but it was natural for her to write from a woman's viewpoint and now she's enjoying the camaraderie of this top-to-bottom female-driven experience with TNT, which happens to mirror her publishing experience with female editors quarterbacking the books in both NY and London.

It's too soon to know what Rizzoli & Isles’ fate will be but first episode's ratings were huge (breaking all previous records for an ad-supported cable series debut with nearly 8 million viewers, which is double the norm—and nearly 100% of the audience was retained from The Closer, the lead-in show) and week #2 barely lost 10%, so there’s a decent chance we'll be seeing more than just these first 10 episodes.  If Tamaro's scripts can keep on par with Gerritsen's topnotch novels and the current love affair between books and television continues, Rizzoli & Isles and its girl power could be around for quite a while, spawning the next generation of female screenwriters, novelists, cops and medical examiners in the process.  Hmmm, maybe not so many female medical examiners--but you never know.