Tv Reviews An Unsuitable Job For A Woman

(PBS) 9 tonight

Women, we hear, can be especially tough on other women. Like the delicious English mystery novelist P.D. James, who did the Adam Dalgliesh conundrums. Another of her investigators, young Cordelia Gray, begins a "Mystery!" run in "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman."

Just how unsuitable?

This is an interesting yarn, even clever, but it's very confounding stuff. James is invariably confounding as fresh-faced Cordelia (Helen Baxendale) bumbles through her first case.

She's working for a terminally ill private eye who kills himself. Cordelia is willed the agency and determines to carry on. She gets hired by a foul, surly Cambridge scientist who wants her to prove that his son's suicide wasn't. Was it murder? (Of course.) Will Cordelia, an obvious softie, fall in love with the dead lad? (Of course.) Can she solve the case? (Naturally.)

As produced by Ecosse Films, Harvest Entertainment and WGBH/Boston, it suffers from slowness, and director Ben Bolt also lets his star function at low energy. It feels as if the story is strrrrrrretched to fill the three one-hour segments.

(For reference: We're seeing more of Baxendale, but in a less deadly assignment. She's playing Ross' London girlfriend, Emily, on "Friends." At 8 p.m. on May 7, she'll marry Ross on NBC; an hour later, she'll solve this mystery across the dial on PBS.)

Irv Letofsky



VOICES OF THE CHILDREN

(KCET) 10 tonight

Focusing on the story of three survivors imprisoned as children, filmmaker Zuzana Justman's deeply quiet documentary about the Nazis' Terezin murder camp is an extraordinary attempt to reach Holocaust closure by embracing the horrors that took place in those distant days.

The three subjects -- now living in the United States, Austria and the Czech Republic -- are no less extraordinary for their courage, eloquence and acceptance of reality.

For many viewers, however, the docu's most moving moments will come watching excerpts from an actual staging by inmates of Hans Krasa's immensely touching children's opera "Brundibar" (available on CD in three different modern performances).

Incredibly, we have these few minutes of incongruous beauty, symbolizing the world of lost children, because of the chilling arrogance of the Nazis, who filmed it for propaganda purposes.

Laurence Vittes