My lovely lady has a thing for Angie Harmon (right). Must be why she’s with me, I’m the image y’know. Seriously though, ever since the Texan lovely drawled in a skirt in the original Law and Order, she’s had a thing for her. Personally, I think she needs to eat three pizzas a day for a month before she’s a healthy weight, but the lady sure is easy on the eye. Plus, as she gets older, she gets hotter.

Now the lady with dubious political beliefs (she’s a Republican but sure we can’t all be perfect), is in a new show that is causing all sorts of murmurings on t’internet. Rizzoli and Isles is a cop show. So far so meh, but it’s a cop show in which the two main characters are women. “Oooh, tell me more Hal”, I hear you say.

Based on the books by Tess Gerristen, Rizzoli and Isles is pretty much your usual procedural cop show. Jane Rizzoli, played by my lookalike, is a tomboy – Boston homocide cop from a close Italian family. Her dad, played by Chazz Palminteri, is a plumber and her mother, played by Lorraine Bracco, is your typical over-bearing Italian mama.

Rizzoli’s best friend, and the Boston medical examiner, is Maura Isles played by NCIS’s Sasha Alexander. Maura comes from money, lots of it, and was schooled in a “fancy French boarding school” as Rizzoli says.  Maura is a bit of a genius, but with genius comes madness and she’s plenty of that too.

They are opposites but it works and, in Angie Harmon’s words, “if the two of them were one woman, she’d be heaven”. What has the internet chatting is the fact that the writers and actors have obviously decided to add a layer of subtext to their relationship. The lingering looks are lezzie to the max people!

It’s only four or five episodes in and already there is fanfic and the couple have been nicknamed Rizzisles. In the very first episode they are on a bed together, as friendly as Xena and Gabby. Upon watching the first, I thought it was just Sasha Alexander who had decided to add a layer to her character and have her in love/lust with her best mate. She undresses Rizzoli with her eyes so many times, I felt flush. As the eps arrive, though, Angie is adding some to the mix. She compliments Maura’s outfit at least once an episode.

One of the episodes coming up is called I Kissed a Girl, and Rizzoli has to go under-cover in a lesbian bar. Come on, tell me the writers don’t know who their audience is!

There has been some backlash to all of this though. If there are two men playing cop partners, we don’t immediately think they are a couple. But if it’s two women we look for subtext. Why? Can’t women on television be friends? Or have the powers that be in TV-land been so successful in making women sex-objects, that we assume there has to be some sexual reason for them to be there?

Popularity: 2% [?]