Like the candy and ice cream that Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson cannot resist, season two of TNT’s “The Closer” is a rich, gooey, addictive mess. As portrayed by Kyra Sedgwick, Johnson is a sugar-rush in latex gloves and curls. Scenery, as well as dessert, gets chewed, but it’s hard to turn away. When she bites into a candy bar after solving a case, her glow is post-coital.
Calorie count aside, there is nothing especially groundbreaking about the series. Instead, Johnson is blessed with assets of the TV cops who precede her. She has Kojak’s sweet tooth. Like McCloud, she is a fish out of water, a brainy but scattered Southern belle amongst the California nouveau riche. Her ethnically diverse team of jokester underlings (detectives Sanches, Flynn, Proverra, Tao, et al.) is right out of Barney Miller. And her steel-trap mind, at odds with a big heart, makes for riveting interrogation room finales. Also, former L.A. district attorney Gil Garcetti is on board as a consulting producer, providing the show with both credibility and the specter of O.J. Simpson.
Sedgwick is as gorgeous as her cousin Edie once was, but in action her face is more Picasso than Warhol. Lips, accentuated with globs of pink lipstick, seem to stretch up to her eyebrows. Her eyes, often magnified behind black-framed glasses, alternate between steely ball bearings and teary puddles. She packs so much character into her petite frame that some spills right out. Her purse, roughly the size of Utah, overflows with pieces of a disjointed life.
The show is shot and edited beautifully, whether it’s the camera looming over sunny waters as a drowned mother and daughter are pulled to the surface or the quick, gory takes of a severed head pulled from a dumpster. The writing shines too. In the season’s best segment, Johnson instructs her sidekick sergeant on the proper way to notify a mother of her child’s death. As they drive toward the parent’s home, flash-forward scenes of him performing the task intercut her monologue. The lesson concludes as they pull up to the house and she forewarns, “Now get ready. You’re about to become the main character in someone’s worst day ever.” Not exactly sweet talk.
