Most crime shows open with a murder — a brutal park slashing or a nighttime break-in by a serial killer in a ski mask. “The Protector,” a new series on Lifetime that begins on Sunday, offers an even more chilling tableau of horror: a woman, late for work, trying to hurry two children through breakfast before they miss their school bus.

“There’s never enough time,” the mother, Gloria Sheppard (Ally Walker), says.

And increasingly on television, there’s never enough time because men are lazy. Also, they are not that bright. And that’s why women do almost all of the work at home, and the brunt of it at work, too.

That is certainly the premise of “The Protector.” Gloria is a divorced mother of two who does it all. She stays up all night sewing a school-play costume for her younger son and still manages to solve complex cases that her dullard male colleagues shrug off.

As with the harried working mother Sarah Jessica Parker plays in a coming movie, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” we don’t know how Gloria does it. But she obviously feels that she can’t count on any co-worker to pull his own weight or rely on a husband to share the load at home. (The pilot suggests that her ex was a philanderer, but the details are left out.)