I’m writing articles lately on female characters who actually work, so brace yourself for multiple Da Vinci’s Inquest posts.

Detective Angela Kosmo is ambitious, hot-headed and occasionally lazy. She wants to get ahead, and is quick to jump on opportunities (as is every other cop on DI). Though she’s generally a very good detective, sometimes she stops investigating a case when she’s got the answer she was expecting. And when someone’s screwing with her behind her back, she … READ MORE

I’ve complained a lot on this site about female assistants and second-in-commands who fall for their bosses, lack leadership skills, screw up but get patted on the head for it… in short, act as live demonstrations for the myth that women just can’t hack it in a man’s world.

Meet an exception: Helen, the assistant to Dominic Da Vinci on Da Vinci’s Inquest.

Helen is just like a lot of assistants I’ve met in real life. She’s overqualified, because this is … READ MORE

I wrote a few weeks ago about the brilliant Canadian series that airs on WGN in the US: DaVinci’s Inquest. My post focused on the fact that gender just isn’t an issue in this show. Characters are defined by their jobs, by what they do; rather than by the body they do it in.

That said, I suddenly realized the other day that I’d left out a very important element of the show: the missing prostitutes. Throughout the … READ MORE

I wrote a while back about an episode of Da Vinci’s Inquest I watched, and how every single role could have been gender-flipped and the story still would have worked, because there were simply no unecessary gender distinctions being made. Since then, I’ve seen a lot more of this show, and it’s still exceeding my expectations.

This is one of the most smartly written shows I’ve seen. There’s no formula, so stories can go almost anywhere. All the main … READ MORE

I saw my first couple of episodes of DaVinci’s Inquest recently, and something jumped out at me: in those two episodes, you could have switched the gender on any or every character in the show, and the story would have been the same. Gender was irrelevant.

I didn’t get the sense the writers were trying to be politically correct, either. Gender is pretty irrelevant in most work situations, unless you go out of your way to make a big … READ MORE