Over the years, TV has offered up an entire precinct worth of women cops — from Angie Dickinson’s spicy Pepper Anderson in the ‘70s hit Police Woman, to Helen Mirren’s flinty Jane Tennison in the great ’90s series Prime Suspect, to Mariska Hargitay’s driven Olivia Benson, who will doubtless still be solving sex crimes on Law & Order: SVU long after the oceans have swallowed New York City. We’ve watched so many women with badges that it’s easy to forget there was a time when most men believed there shouldn’t be any.
That belief is the starting point of a new Mexican-made TV series, Women in Blue which is streaming on AppleTV+. Set in the hyper-conservative Mexico of 1971, this lively 10-part drama focuses on four vastly different women who go to work for the police and discover that it’s easier to capture a serial killer than to deal with the assorted misogynies of the men around them.
As the story begins, Mexico City is being terrorized by a woman-killing maniac known as the Undresser, for the way he leaves his victims. To distract from the force’s failure to catch this killer, the police chief cooks up a publicity stunt. He announces that he’s opening up the police department to women, an idea he feels sure will get scads of upbeat coverage.
We follow four new recruits. Foremost among them is María, who once dreamed of being a detective but wound up an elegant bourgeois mother with a husband you know is cheating the instant you see him. There’s her sister Valentina, a revved-up feminist who hates the government. There’s Ángeles, a loner who does most of the actual crime solving. And finally there’s Gabina, a born cop whose policeman father slaps her face for joining the force against his wishes.
These four shine in training, but when it comes time to do the job — dressed in blue mini-skirts! — they’re treated as a joke. Sent out to patrol a park, they’re given not weapons but a bag with coins — to call the cops if they uncover a crime. Naturally, they do uncover one — they find the Undresser’s latest victim. And even though they’re ordered not to, they throw themselves into tracking down the killer.
