HBO launches female-centric detective series

The last time HBO built a series around primarily female characters, the show was “Sex and the City” and it revolved around four white women exploring the mysteries of love in the wilds of New York.

Now, the premium cable network is launching another female-centric show, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,”about two black women investigating mysteries within the wilds of Africa.

In tone, feel and locale, the new series, starring singer Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose, couldn’t be more different from its female-themed predecessor or from any other of HBO’s previous hit shows like “Deadwood,” “Six Feet Under” or “The Sopranos.”

The leisurely paced crime drama centers on a caring, plump businesswoman who has little time for men and operates in a world where whites are all but invisible.

Premiering Sunday night, it will be distinct – a drama with an all-black cast – and also will be unique in American television as the only series ever set in Africa in which none of the protagonists is white.

It stars Grammy-winning singer Scott, a relative newcomer to acting, whose character speaks English with a distinctly Botswanan dialect. Also, the drama, despite its crime-solving conceit, contains little violence, no sex and no profanity.

In fact, it is the first original HBO series that is family-friendly enough to air at 8 p.m.

“This is definitely a little different from what we usually do,” says Michael Lombardo, president of HBO’s programming group.

“But it speaks to what we’re always looking for – distinct points of view that are smart and well executed – and presents something that people will not see on ad-supported television.”

Based on a best-selling series of books by Alexander McCall Smith, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” turns on Scott, who is the caring and relentlessly hopeful Precious Ramotswe.

Thanks to skills fostered by her father, she decides to open the only female-owned detective agency in Botswana. (Rose plays her quirky, no-nonsense secretary Grace Makutsi.)

Scott was found after an extensive search for the role and studied two months to nail the proper African accent.

“I wasn’t intimidated by the acting,” says Scott, whose most noteworthy role previous to the series was as an overweight woman who is dumped by her husband in “Why Did I Get Married?”

“Ever since I was young, I would dress up, try to make myself cry. I’ve always been acting,” she says.

The series boasts an impressive, though bittersweet, pedigree: The two-hour pilot was the last project directed by Oscar-winner director Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient”), who died in 2008 from complications after surgery for tonsil cancer.

The project also lost executive producer Sydney Pollack, the Oscar-winning director of “Out of Africa,” who died later that year.

“Anthony wanted Precious to be really genuine, and he would talk to me all the time about how she had to be really hopeful,” says Scott, whose character is haunted by an abusive relationship that resulted in the death of her infant.

“I just hope it succeeds exactly the way Anthony wanted it to. He loved me, and I loved him right back.”

Adapting the books was a labor of love for Minghella, who was determined to show a softer, more evenhanded portrait of Africa, Lombardo says.

“Yes, there are all these problems that the Western press has focused on,” he says. “But Anthony had a missionary zeal to show that Africa is more than just a continent of disease and poverty.”