The series' production company, Euston Films, a wholly owned subsidiary of Thames Television, was set up in 1971 to make high-quality films and film series for television and had a strong track record with the crime genre, being responsible for Special Branch, The Sweeney, Out, and Minder. Characteristics of the Euston series included London location shooting in a "fast" realist style, working-class and often semicrimi­nal milieus, and sharp scripts. Widows offered these fa­miliar pleasures but also engaged with changing ideas of appropriate feminine behavior by audaciously presenting the widows of the title tutoring themselves in criminality so they could be agents, not victims. In this sense, the series, which had Verity Lambert as executive producer and Linda Agran as producer, was clearly a Euston product; the series also must be understood in relation to earlier shows that had tried to insert women into the crime genre-such as Cagney and Lacey, The Gentle Touch, and Juliet Bravo. The difference with Widows was that the women were on the wrong side of the law.

     Following the success of the first series of Widows-which had six episodes and a continuous narrative-a second series was commissioned, and the two were broadcast together in 1985. Again, the narrative was continuous over the two series, and at the end of Widows II, the central character, Dolly Rawlins, was imprisoned. Some years later, in 1995, La Plante, the writer of the first series, produced the final part to what had become a trilogy, She's Out, in which Dolly returns. She's Out reprises Widows I to some extent, in that its climax was a carefully planned train robbery­ conducted, spectacularly, by women on  horseback­ but the general critical consensus was that neither of the sequels quite matched Widows I. (La Plante also adapted and produced a remake of Widows for a 2002 ABC miniseries of the same name, with Mercedes Ruehl as Dolly and also starring Brooke Shields and Rosie Perez.)

     Retrospectively, Widows is now perhaps most interesting as La Plante's first successful foray into a territory she has made peculiarly her own, the hard world of women in the television crime genre. Her subsequent projects, which include the internationally successful Prime Suspect, in which Helen Mirren plays a chief inspector on a murder case, and The Governor, in which Janet McTeer plays an inexperienced governor given a prison to run, have tended to place their central female characters within a male hierarchy and visual repertoire. Here the women must both confront the prejudice of their colleagues and successfully inhabit and wield power in the context of law enforcement and criminal justice. In contrast, Widows, the first of La Plante's "women in a man's world" dramas, was set explicitly in a criminal milieu. with the women attempting to support themselves through robbery rather than learning how to occupy masculine positions of power. This approach had a series of interesting consequences.

     First, the representation of female criminality in the crime series is strongly focused around the figures of the prostitute and the shoplifter. not the ambitious and successful bank robbers viewers find in Widows. Thus the series shook up expectations about what women in crime series can do. Second, because the women are having to learn to perform as men, femininity is "made strange" and becomes a mode of behavior that the women consciously turn on when they need to escape detection. Finally, it should be noted that the heroes of this series. three white. one black, were all working class in origin-although Dolly. well-off from the proceeds of Harry's crimes, listens to opera-and the series thus has a place in the history of honorable endeavor by both Euston Films and La Plante to depict working-class life as diverse and contradictory-and more than comic.