Considered one of the most important contemporary British television dramatists, Lynda La Plante is energetic and prolific and has achieved success in several diverse media fields. Originally an actor, La Plante is also a best-selling novelist and currently runs her own production company, La Plante Productions, as well as having gained both popular and critical recognition for her serious and intelligent television dramas. Apart from her series Lifeboat (1994), which was centered on the intrigues of a coastal community (almost in the fashion of a soap opera), La Plante's dramas have been generally constructed around the imperatives of crime, punishment, and underworld intrigue.

     As an actor, La Plante appeared on British television in several well-known crime series of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including The Sweeney and The Gentle Touch. Usually typecast as either a prostitute or a gangster's moll, La Plante's experience as a television actor ensured that she was grounded in the narrative dynamics of the British crime series, while also making her only too aware of the subordinate role generally assigned to female characters in the genre. Having written for her own pleasure since her childhood, La Plante began to write and submit scripts for various current police series, scripts that attempted to create roles for women that were much more intelligible, independent, and less subordinate to men. As fate would have it, one of her scripts, titled "The Women," ended up on the desk of producer Verity Lambert at Euston Films at a time when Lambert and her colleague Linda Agran were consciously looking for television dramas that would feature women at the center of both the events and the action. "The Women" became the series Widows, which was broadcast to great public acclaim in 1983 and which was to transform La Plante's career from actor to television dramatist.

     Despite the centrality of women in her writing career-whether as characters such as Dolly Rawlins (Widows and She's Out) and Jane Tennison (Prime Suspect), or as producers such as Lambert-La Plante has eschewed any identification with feminism or feminist agendas. Although undeniably aware of the questions raised and changes brought about by "second-wave" feminism, she has included women's issues (such as Tennison's abortion in the Prime Suspect series) in incidental rather than pivotal positions in her dramas.

     La Plante's female protagonists are neither saintly nor unproblematic. Dolly Rawlins murdered her husband, and Jane Tennison finds it necessary to repress her own emotional needs to the extent that she not only obscures much of her own femininity (qualities traditionally accepted as feminine such as care and compassion) but, at times, also seemingly manages to lose sight of her humanity.

     Despite the problematic nature of her protagonists, some critics accuse La Plante of producing works that actively espouse ideas of the "politically correct," and which succeeded in  portraying all men as bastards and oppressors of women. To the contrary, La Plante has, in fact, provided some of the most disturbingly frank yet sympathetic male characters to appear on British television in recent times. In programs such as Civvies (but also in Comics and Prime Suspect), La Plante has uniquely explored the bonds of love between hetero­ sexual men. Although poorly received by the public and critics (because of its brutality and lack of sentiment), Civvies undoubtedly portrays extraordinary love between men.

     Male violence is often at the heart of La Plante's work. She does not excuse it, nor does she shy away from its reality and implications. In many ways, she is eager to get to the heart of this violence and depict it in a matter-of-fact manner. This ambition can be seen,in a formalized way in Seconds Out, Prime Suspect, and, to a lesser extent, in Framed, where La Plante explores some of the dynamics of boxing. She displays obvious fascination with the ways in which dimensions of male physicality and brutality are enacted and performed in boxing competitions, training sessions, and sparring bouts.

     La Plante's dramas, on the whole, do not champion either gender but try to discuss both inequalities and power relations as they exist within society. For the most part, her protagonists (both male and female) stand for reason, the ability to think intelligently, and expertise. In her dramas, La Plante is not interested in small-scale petty crime; she is preoccupied by both exceptional crimes and feats of exceptional detection. La Plante's crime dramas often focus on the minutiae of planning (Widows, Prime Suspect, Framed, She's Out) and the exhibition of particular skills and expertise, such as Gloria's demonstration of weapons in She's Out.

     A concern for realism and accuracy of procedure (whether in a police station, a pathology lab, or a prison) has become one of the hallmarks of La Plante's work. Her dramas are based on her own detailed and painstaking research, and her elaborate and detailed scripts demand absolute accuracy of mise-en-scene, performance, and procedure.

The formation of her own production company, La Plante Productions, in 1994 can be interpreted as an attempt to integrate her own creative input at each stage of production. Her subsequent output has been prolific but has also taken two distinct directions. In the United Kingdom, with dramas such as Supply and Demand, Trial and Retribution, and Killer Net, La Plante has synthesized many of her earlier narrative traits and preoccupations but also has strived for a vivid engagement with televisuality by straying into the seedier aspects of cyberspace and employing graphic imagery such as the use of parallel narratives on split screens to produce an overall look of flashy finesse. In the United States, her recent productions (The Warden, Framed, and Windows) have been less innovative but have involved an American reworking of some of her greatest British hits (The Governor, Framed, and Widows).