There is something quietly satisfying about watching television change without making a grand announcement about it. For years, women could be central to a crime drama and yet somehow still feel as though they were borrowing the lead role. Now, increasingly, they are simply the lead — complicated, difficult, brilliant, exhausted, authoritative women who are allowed to carry an entire series without the story constantly explaining why they deserve to be there.
And then there is Suranne Jones.
I first really registered her power in Doctor Foster, where she took a character who could so easily have become a familiar betrayed-wife stereotype and made her unpredictable, uncomfortable and completely magnetic. So seeing her later step into Vigil felt almost like watching television itself move forward with her.
As DCI Amy Silva, she is dropped into perhaps one of the most aggressively male environments imaginable: a nuclear submarine, sealed beneath the sea, surrounded by military hierarchy, suspicion, hostility and men who are not particularly pleased to have an outsider investigating them. There is nowhere to retreat, no friendly police station to return to, no reassuring landscape outside the window. She has to investigate a death while physically trapped inside the world of the people she is questioning.
And she never needs to become one of the men in order to survive it.
That is what I particularly love about the performance. Silva is not written as invulnerable. She carries anxiety, trauma and emotional history with her. The submarine affects her. The confinement affects her. Yet none of this diminishes her authority. She continues questioning, observing and pushing when everyone around her would rather she stopped.
Suranne Jones manages that balance beautifully. She can appear physically vulnerable in one moment and completely in command of an interrogation in the next. There is no need to give her exaggerated toughness or turn her into an action hero. Her strength is in refusing to be intimidated.
Perhaps that is one of the more interesting changes happening in crime drama. Women are no longer only being introduced as the unusual female detective, the woman entering a man’s world, or the exception that needs explaining. They arrive, they take the centre of the story — and they stay there.
From Doctor Foster to the claustrophobic corridors of Vigil, Suranne Jones seems almost perfectly suited to that change. Put her inside a submarine filled with secrets, aggressive personalities and men accustomed to controlling their own world, and somehow she still manages to make the space belong to her.
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