The popular TNT series The Closer begins its final season this week (Mondays, 9 p.m. EDT). Series producer James Duff is preparing a spinoff called Major Crimes. Closer star Kyra Sedgwick says that she wants a “really dark” ending to the show but expects Duff to demur, though the season will include a good deal of trouble for the crime-solving protagonist, according to USA Today:
I’m looking forward to the resumption of new episodes of TNT’s crime drama The Closer tonight. That may come as a surprise to some readers, and even to the show’s producers. I raised a storm of anger a few weeks ago when I wrote a very pointed criticism of the show’s midseason cliffhanger episode, in which I argued that the motive given for the central character’s intended mass killing was both unconvincing and politically tendentious. I’ll admit that I used incendiary phrasing in the piece, and unnecessarily. I wish I hadn’t. The use of vivid language is aesthetically pleasing and can convey ideas with great dramatic force, but it can also suggest an emotional reaction that is not intended. I wish I had kept the language more neutral and objective, as that was my real reaction to the episode: I had merely wished it to be better. In using such tart language, I ended up distracting attention from two main points I wanted to make. One was that I am in general a great admirer of The Closer, and have been since the show’s inception. (Even though I stated this explicitly in the piece, my interlocutors here and elsewhere failed
As I noted a few weeks ago, the TNT crime drama series The Closer has long been largely nonpolitical while exploring interesting and important ideas in a fair manner. Unfortunately, as I pointed out at the time, an episode this season broke from that pattern and made an awkward, overt political statement characterizing opposition to illegal immigration as a violent, dangerous impulse. The showmakers were back at it again last night, this time tarring opposition to affirmative action as the evil du jour. The story follows the elite LA crime unit led by brilliant detective Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) as it pursues a middle-aged white male who is planning a major mass killing, having failed at an attempt a few years before and escaping capture. In setting up the mass killing, he murders two paramedics, which is how the crime unit picks up his trail. (Note that there are really no spoilers here, as the episode has no whodunit aspect, nor any real suspense of any kind.) You’ll notice that I describe the killer as white, male, and middle-aged. That’s because the very point of the episode is to convey approval of identity politics. The killer, you see, is
I have long argued that contemporary U.S. entertainment offers a much greater variety of ideas and points of view than conservatives usually seem to realize, pointing out that many TV shows, movies, and music releases convey very sound values and ideas that traditionalists and lovers of liberty should appreciate. But there are still plenty of times when the producers of even good series that aren’t usually political (in contrast to, say, the intensely political Law and Order) have to take their jabs at the dangerously ignorant boobs they see as populating Middle America. Two crime dramas in the past week have done just that. Last week’s episode of The Closer, on TNT, set up a typical serial killer story but with an obviously political angle: the people being killed were all female illegal immigrants. Even more pointedly (spoiler alert), it turns out that the murderer is an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) who chooses them as his targets because their lack of documentation makes it less likely he’ll be caught. The point of all of this is absurdly obvious, intended to suggest that illegal immigrants are unfairly singled our for abuse in the United States and made
Radical environmentalism and an anti-human perversion of Darwinism spark an attempt at mass murder in the season-ending episode of the acclaimed TNT drama series The Closer.
Two superb TV series, The Closer and Saving Grace, both return this evening, on Turner Network Television (TNT), at 9:00 and 10:00 EDT, respectively.
The TV crime drama The Closer returns tonight with a two-hour movie to kick off its third season (or part two of a divided second season; I’m not sure how the producers and cable channel are categorizing it). The program stars Kyra Sedgwick as a harried, middle-aged, unmarried Southern belle who works as a deputy police chief in Los Angeles and has to adjust to professional and personal problems in the unfamiliar milieu of Lalaland. As I noted earler on the Reform Club blog, The Closer is not nearly as arch as it may sound: an unacknowledged Americanization of the long-running British police procedural TV program Prime Suspect. In The Closer, now in its second season, Kyra Sedgwick plays a police detective and homicide team supervisor who solves crimes while stumbling charmingly through a rather bumpy personal life. It’s a good show, made appealing by Sedgwick’s excellent performance. She’s quite likeable as the protagonist, and her various problems are handled by both herself and the program’s writers with a fairly light touch. Unlike most episodes of the program, had a solid puzzle with several suspects, and the viewer had enough info to solve the
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