In the beginning there were Cagney & Lacey, two women working as police detectives in New York,  (therefore the italian title New York, New York) solving crimes while struggling with their personal problems in the same-name CBS tv series, aired in USA for seven season in the Eighties. The two main characters, Christine Cagney (the blond one) and Mary Beth Lacey (the brunette one)  , couldn’t be more different: the first one was a single,  independent woman which often made poor choices choosing her boyfriends (not always to her fault), the second one a married woman with children, with all the problems of a working mother and wife. Strongly influenced from the feminism movement of the seventies, it was the first buddy-cop tv series EVER with two women as main characters  to air on national television, and the two (great) actresses,  Tin Daly and  Sharon Gless,  combined managed to win for SIX years in a row the Emmy for Best Actress in a Lead Drama.

In the 2011, on the english channel ITV debuted a crime series strongly influenced by this american series, starting from the title, Scott & Bailey, with two great british actresses as the female lead, Suranne Jones and Leslie Sharp. This time the blond Janet Scott (Sharp), is the one married, and the brunette, Rachel Bailey (Jones) is the single one. But time has changed and so they both have their good share of trouble at home, and at work too, with husband, lovers, brothers and men in general, even if the most troubled and cursed with bad luck is Bailey. The main difference with the american series is  that now also their boss, detective inspector Gill Murray, is a woman, a situation simply not conceivable back in the Eighties…

Here’s the promo for the fourth series of Scott & Bailey,
starting tonight in Uk on ITV at 21 :