5 Reasons To Become Obsessed with BBC's The Fall

It’s one of the darkest series on TV. But dark can be mesmerizing and the BBC/Netflix series The Fall is totally mesmerizing. Season 1 is streaming on Netflix and season 2 premiered Jan.16. So you could spend the weekend watching both seasons. To hell with sleep.

If you loved Jane Tennyson (Helen Mirren) in BBC’s Prime Suspect series, you will love Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) in The Fall even more. Tennyson and Gibson are similar characters–trenchant, introspective, stressed-out, nearly burned-out women of a certain age with insecurities they hide well from those around them. Both these female detective inspectors are in charge of men in what remains a predominantly male job. And both are provocatively sexual. In season five of Prime Suspect, Jane had an affair with a younger colleague. In The Fall, Stella–well, you’ll see.

The Fall is one of those series you hope will go on forever. Catch it now, on Netflix.

5. She Sees Dead People

Metropolitan Police Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is tasked with reviewing investigations. Stella is sent to darkly beautiful Belfast, with all its traumatic history, to the Police Service of Northern Ireland to assess the progress of a murder investigation into the death of a young woman, Alice Munroe, that has remained active for longer than 28 days. (They solve murders a lot quicker in NI than in the US, apparently–but then they don’t have as many.) But once there, Stella discovers there are more problems than she could have expected. Like the fact that no one else figured out Alice’s death was linked to others.

4. Psycho Killer Qu'est-ce Que C’est

Once Stella discovers a serial killer is on the loose (he’s revealed in the first episode, so this isn’t a spoiler), she realizes he’s attacking young professional women in the city of Belfast. What is surprising is who is doing the killing. And why. That revelation reverberates through both the city and the squad Stella is charged with monitoring. It also raises questions for the viewer about male violence, how insidious it is and how we all accept it as a natural part of daily life. Some critics have complained that The Fall glorifies rape. Or maybe it’s just telling the story every woman has heard since girlhood–and telling it from the female perspective.

3. Killing Them Softly

Stella unpacks feminism. Anderson’s portrayal of Stella Gibson is luminous. Last year she played the highly complex psychiatrist Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier to cannibal Hannibal Lecter in NBC’s homoerotic horror series, Hannibal, from gay showrunner Bryan Fuller. She also played international CEO Meg Fitch in NBC’s short-lived Crisis. And for many of us, Anderson will always be The X-Files Dana Scully. In The Fall Anderson employs Scully’s acerbic cynicism yet tempers it with something a little broken. We want to know more about her because she’s so real. Stella Gibson makes us realize just how much the male gaze has defined the female detectives we’ve grown up seeing, from Charlie’s Angels and Cagney & Lacey to SVU’s Olivia Benson and The Closer’s “Brenda Leigh Johnson. Stella Gibson shows us, point blank, what women have to give up to succeed at a “man’s” job.

2. Dressed to Kill

How many times did we hope Archie Panjabi’s Kalinda Sharma would just lean over and kiss Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife? Only every scene in which they were together. (Remember season 2 when they sat on the bed together drinking beer?) Well, Panjabi, who plays pathologist Dr. Reed Smith in The Fall told E! on Jan. 21 that “kissing Gillian Anderson can change your life.” We believe that. We also believe kissing Archie Panjabi could change your life. But we’ll settle for watching the two of them kiss on The Fall.

1.When Stella Met Paul

There is a lot of brilliance in The Fall but there’s none more so than how Stella addresses both murderer and victim. Stella is never dispassionate, even when she is reserved. While Jane Tennyson sometimes came off as just plain cranky, Stella can come off as having this steely, controlled irateness. She’s sick of men. She’s sick of their intrusiveness, their disrespect of her and other women. She’s sick of wanting to fuck them (though she discards them pretty easily). She’s sick of their inevitable and endless violence. At one point, Stella is being goaded by a fellow detective, who can’t help reading sex into Stella’s pas de deux with the killer. We know it’s not there, but because the male detective is thinking with his dick, he projects that onto Stella. She reads him: "A woman, I forget who, once asked a male friend why men felt threatened by women. He replied that they were afraid that women might laugh at them. When she asked a group of women why women felt threatened by men, they said, 'We're afraid they might kill us.' He might fascinate you. I despise him with every fiber of my being.” And that’s why you have to watch The Fall.

Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer and the author and editor of nearly 30 books. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 SPJ Award for Enterprise Reporting in May 2014. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and a columnist and contributing editor for Curve magazine and Lambda Literary Review. Her reporting and commentary has appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer. Her book, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for cultural & historical fiction. Her novel, Ordinary Mayhem will be published in February 2015. @VABVOX