TV Review: Kyra Sedgwick Continues to Shine on TNT’s ‘The Closer’

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CHICAGO – One of the best shows on basic cable returns this week with the fifth season premiere of “The Closer,” a dark, gut-wrenching episode that hints at a potentially series-altering summer for the beloved mystery series.

Television Rating: 3.5/5.0

Headed by one of the best performances on television from the excellent Kyra Sedgwick, “The Closer” has always been a show that has been unafraid to go below the surface of its darkest stories and the fifth season premiere is a brutal and riveting one. The show has always expertly segued between dark humor and grisly murder, but there’s barely a smile, much less a chuckle, in tonight’s debut.

The Closer
Photo credit: Karen Neal

A woman and her children are gunned down in their own house. After the husband is interviewed and seems innocent, the Major Crimes unit and Brenda are lost for a suspect before stumbling on to something much darker than they ever expected.

Brenda won’t let a case, especially one with dead children, go unsolved. What separates “The Closer” is how expertly Sedgwick brings this character’s drive to life. She doesn’t just want to get the bad guys. She needs to get the bad guys.

The Closer Photo credit: Andrew Eccles

Sedgwick brings every painful development of the case to life. She continues to give one of the best performances on television and if the season continues at the caliber of the premiere, it may be the BEST female performance all summer long.

And the end of the season premiere of “The Closer” is such a dark, foreboding epilogue to the episode that one has to wonder, especially given the TNT press release that says “it’s going to be a year of change,” if this isn’t the tone that the series will maintain all summer. It could be a dark one for Brenda and the Major Crimes Unit.

I have yet to make “The Closer” appointment television. As I wrote earlier this year, “What holds it back from jumping from a nice diversion when I happen to catch it to appointment programming is the lack of intriguing mysteries. I rarely find the actual crimes and their resolutions as intriguing as, say, “The Mentalist,” “Bones,” or “Life”. The characters on “The Closer” are fantastic, the mysteries are so-so.”

The premiere of season five is strong enough that I will definitely tune into the second episode and “The Closer” may finally become season pass material, as it is for so many other viewers. I’ve long thought that there was room and potential for “The Closer” to go from good to great. I think season five could be when that happens.

If you need to catch up with “The Closer” after tonight’s fifth season premiere, pick up the recently released “The Closer: The Complete Fourth Season” from Warner Brothers. Last year was certainly a season of change for the show as well as a journalist wrote a story about the Priority Homicide Division that brought Brenda’s group to a bitter end.

All fifteen episodes of season four (which aired last summer and returned earlier this year to finish out its run) are presented in widescreen with a Dolby Surround 5.1 track. Special feature include “Police Files: Unaired Scenes,” “To Catch a Lie: Observational Tips From an FBI Interrogator,” “A Day in the Life of a Homicide Detective: Series Star Corey Reynolds Rides Along With Retired LAPS Detective Mike Berchem,” and a gag reel.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com