Helen Mirren's swansong as DS Tennison is deeply satisfying to watch Prime Suspect: the final act ITV1

The papers have given away Prime Suspect's unhappy ending: DS Jane Tennison dies. We won't know how until part two on Sunday (9pm, 22 October) - not even we critics, because ITV has meanly withheld the final 20 minutes from our preview tapes. All we do know - because Helen Mirren, who plays Jane, has said so - is that it is not death by anything so clichéd as a bullet. Yet, as Dr Johnson said, it matters not how a man dies, but how he lives, and the first part of this final outing for our most famous female detective after Miss Marple (15 October) examined how the detective superintendent had lived her life. Despite all her commendations in the force, the audit was not a happy one. "I hope," said her smugly married sister, "you got what you wanted from life, I really do."

The fact is that it can be a lifetime's work not becoming the kind of person one hates, and it is not clear whether Tennison has succeeded. Fifteen years ago in Lynda La Plante's original Prime Suspect, Tennison battled on two fronts: in King's Cross with a serial killer and at the cop shop with her Neanderthal comrades. Now it is Tennison who has the drink problem, Tennison who cannot communicate and Tennison who is tired and cynical. Her boss knows her type: "Battered, burnt-out dinosaurs, and what do they do when they leave? They drink themselves to death."

Back in 1991, her worst enemy was DS Bill Otley, a clapped-out copper. On Sunday, he became the only person she could think of to comfort her when her father dies. A veteran of Alcoholics Anonymous, Otley did the 12 Step thing and asked her forgiveness. In what must have been one of his last performances, a visibly ill Tom Bell presented a heart-rendingly bleak vision of personal redemption.

But it is Mirren as Tennison who makes you weep. Her dying dad (Frank Finlay) reprimands her for neglecting the family, but it is her private life that has fallen into ruin. In an early scene she wakes from the amnesiac sleep of the alcoholic to find her bed empty but tousled. In the bathroom the lavatory seat is propped up. Did a man come back with her? Does she recall who he was?

She cannot remember the phone call informing her of the disappearance of 14-year-old Sallie Sturdy, and her conduct of the ensuing murder investigation is befuddled by drink. She accuses the dead girl's father of having booze on his breath, mistaking her own fumes for his. She almost crashes her car. Drinking on duty used to be a perk of the job: that is not how the Modern Met sees it, nor our censorious youth, one of whom she is giving a lift home.

Tennison's touching relationship with Sallie's friend Penny (Laura Greenwood) is a grace note in a drama much interested in youth and experience. The orthodoxy of the yobette culture at Penny and Sallie's school is that "sex is not such a big thing, not like adults make out". Tennison, a product of Sixties feminism, is one of those old-fangled adults. Yet youth is not omniscient, and when it becomes clear that the dead girl had "consensual" sex with her headmaster, the moral prism shifts towards Tennison's view. When a toddler points a loaded gun at her, Tennison, the cop supposedly without maternal instinct, knows how to talk her down.

Frank Deasy reclaims the series from its mid-Nineties doldrums, when Mirren really would be confronted by actors saying: "Just what are you inferring, inspector?" Whereas Jimmy McGovern was determined to shoehorn US foreign policy into Cracker the other week, Deasy fills the police procedural genre with questions about ageing, appropriate and inappropriate affection, and sacrifices made for careers. His other theme, loneliness, is emphasised by Philip Martin's direction, which cleverly cuts between the chilly public forums Tennison has to attend: a church, a school assembly hall and an AA meeting.

Watching the second part, I was just wondering if he could have risked a little humour, when Tennison mockingly berated a subordinate: "Don't call me ma'am. I'm not the bloody Queen." It was the only self-indulgence in four hours of deeply satisfying television.

Andrew Billen is a feature writer for the Times

Pick of the week

Torchwood
22 October, 9pm, BBC3
Doctor Who spin-off respun for grown-ups: Welsh cops meet Jones the Alien.

Fear of Fanny
23 October, 9pm, BBC4
Cradock, that is. Julia Davis plays the tragic kitchen Nazi.

Longford
26 October, 9pm, Channel 4
Jim Broadbent as Lord Porn, Samantha Morton as Myra, words by Peter (The Queen) Morgan.

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