WINKY BROAD STUFF
For the Canberra Times, Tuesday 12 September 2006


I'm loving The Closer. (Nine Network, Tuesdays at 9.35. I don't know why it's 35, not 30. It's like asking why everything on Australian Idol is more drawn out than the Sistine Chapel ceiling.) I think I kind of missed that The Closer was back for a while because it was scheduled after that show where people were kick-boxing on ice, or whatever it was. But Channel 9, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou (and you don't hear that so often, these days).

Tonight's is only the third episode in the second series of the Closer, and they're all self-contained, so let me fill you in so you can watch the rest. Kyra Sedgwick plays Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson, who heads a priority murder squad in the sun-blasted, shiny city of Los Angeles, with its unadorned, matte interrogation rooms.

Most regular characters in cop shows are so two dimensional they wouldn't block the photocopier. Or they have the one quirk that's smashed to smithereens each week (we get it, already, Monk's a clean freak). Kyra Sedgwick has been given a more rounded role, and because she's a good actress, Brenda Lee has layers to burn.

The script gives us sight gags straying towards slapstick and an insight into character - she can't park (nudge, bump, smash) , she's addicted to a class of foodstuffs she refers to precisely as "snacks with processed sugar" and is not dealing with it well, she doesn't do the dishes, she can never find her glasses, she's a girly girl with long hair and waisted jackets, and frocks, and high heels, and, if you can believe it, a laugh both tinkling and full of warning.

The point about being a "closer" is that Brenda Lee uses different ways to get the perp (okay, I just wanted to say perp, as if I had a clue). She wheedles, she needles. She gets up in their face. She flirts. She repels. She flashes an accusation. She takes them out to lunch. She figures it out and sets a trap. She appeals to their better side. She uses emotional blackmail. She played the stone-hearted woman. She gets cross with them. She brings up their 'Mom'.

As an actor Sedgwick can do winky broad stuff, and then squinch down to a nuance - that's rare, especially on television. Her big party trick is a Southern US accent and the way Brenda Lee can use Southern charm as a shiv and Southern courtesy as a baseball bat. The accent is irresistible and imitable. 'Glide' become 'glard' and fingerprints becomes a five or six syllable word (ferhangerpreeints).

The Closer is the kind of forget-your-day, suspend-your-cynicism show that makes you want to believe not only that the cops are brilliant and get it right, but that quirky women can rise through the ranks and regularly become senior, hands-on managers of important departments. Since the first series she's won over her squad by showing them loyalty even in the face of career danger; her FBI boyfriend Fritz has moved in, and her mother's come to visit and promises not to tell her dad about the co-habiting.

But there's still tension with her bosses, including J.K. Simmons,(a fine actor often wasted as the perennial consultant psychiatrist in Law and Order, and who is so convincing as part of the steely horror of SBS's brutal jail series, Oz. I'm told. So far, too scared to watch.) The Closer's writers have managed to avoid making the multi-cultural, multi-gender, multi-aged office world not just about sexual tension. As in real life, often it's about figuring out why the boss is in a bad mood, teasing each other, carrying the resident ratbag, or figuring out who deserves your loyalty.

Production values and editing often make you sit up a little straighter on the couch. One recent scene, shot partly from above, of a mob of police standing to attention as their fallen comrades body was taken from a warehouse, elicited real shivers. Another sequence showed the Deputy Chief instructing her colleague on exactly how to inform relatives of a murder in the family while assessing their reactions, intercut with how it works in practice. "Now get ready," she says, with a sideways glance that grimly acknowledges her own experience, "You're about to become the main character in the story of someone's worse day ever."

Because The Closer attracts decent actors, and the writers don't always program "standard plot" into the computer, the perp (ha) isn't always who you think it's going to be - you can't even use the usual method of picking the most familiar face of the guest actors.

I hope I haven't built up The Closer too much. It's not Elizabeth 1 with Helen Mirren, but it's a cut-above cop show that deserves a bigger audience than many of its paint-by-numbers rivals. Kyra Sedgwick didn't win the Emmy a couple of weeks ago for best actress in a TV drama. It went to Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson from Law and Order, Special Victims Unit. It's an obvious injustice that Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson would never have stood for.