In her 'Prime'

Everybody knows that Helen Mirren does not fit neatly into a box.

But there she is -- seven "Prime Suspect" TV movies, 25 hours or so, trussed up in a red boxed set and available for the first time starting tomorrow (Acorn Media, $124.99).

"I'm only now realizing that it was spread over I-don't-know-how-many years," says the actress. "It all telescopes together for me."

The answer is 16 years.

"I can't believe now that it was such a long period of time," she says "because I would go away and do something else and, 'Oh, time to do another 'Prime Suspect.' "

THE ROLE: As the "Prime Suspect" box set is released, Mirren says Jane Tennison put her on the map here.

The natural inclination of TV stars is to do the same thing over and over again. It's the way to keep your job -- not an easy thing to do in TV.

Over the span of 20 years and two sitcoms, Kelsey Grammer played the same characters, fussy Frasier Crane, in 465 episodes. And last week, he Twittered he was thinking about a reunion show.

Mirren, on the hand, played Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison just seven times between 1990 and 2006.

Over that time, Tennision got older; she grew more sure of herself then less. She moved up the ladder at Scotland Yard, became a big drunk, and nearly got knocked off the ladder.

She was a lousy girlfriend, never started a family, got pushed into AA, retirement and, finally, 16 years later, out the door.

All Frasier ever did in 20 years was get divorced and let his father move in.

"Prime Suspect" messed with TV expectations. People wanted more Jane -- but what they got was a different character in each movie.

"If it'd been an American television network," Mirren said last week, "it would have been, 'Here it is, we want you for seven years, and you can't do anything else.'

"The idea of doing that same thing -- and nothing else -- was, to me, the end of my career."

Tennison was, by Mirren's account, the beginning of her career here.

"I'd done the odd movie before then," she says. "But in terms of me, my name, absolutely 'Prime Suspect' was my introduction to America." When the series first started showing on PBS here -- in one-hour, controlled portions rather than the two-hour sit-downs they were created for -- people for the first times started to recognize her on the street.

More conveniently, "it also got me out of playing the girlfriend or the wife kind of thing," she says now. "I'd been getting a lot of that before 'Prime Suspect.' "

Truth is, Mirren told the world in the late 1990s that she was through with Tennison.

"If I'd said, 'I'll do one more,' I would have been tortured. The only way out was just to say. 'No, that's the end of it.' "

After making five movies in six years -- "The first one was still the best, don't you think?" she says -- Mirren waited seven more years before making the final two "Prime Suspect" movies -- in 2003 and 2006 (the same year she won the Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in "The Queen").

"That's why I stopped it, really," she says. " I had become Jane Tennison."

She sighed. "Then I became the Queen.

"Hopefully, in time, I'll become something else."