Question: Let's play armchair programmer. While I am enjoying Major Crimes, it does feel a bit like we're just waiting for Brenda Leigh to show. Do you think they could have benefited from holding Major Crimes until the traditional December run of The Closer to let us get a little distance? Or is it purely a creative question? Major Crimes looks just like The Closer. Could the show benefit from some slight visual tweaks? Perhaps a slightly different opening sequence? — Steven
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One of the things I'll miss most about Brenda Leigh Johnson is her sweet tooth: that secret compulsion and most shameful addiction indulged by the Deputy Chief of the LAPD's Major Crimes Division whenever she reaches for that overstuffed top desk drawer, a Pavlovian response to the nerve-wracking stress of her high-profile job. In a more typical L.A. crime story, the hard-driving boss reveals a weakness for booze. With Brenda, it's the soothing waft of chocolate when she peels back the foil from a Ding Dong, savoring the guilty pleasure.
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On Monday, The Closer's Brenda Leigh Johnson will hear her final confession. But TNT's Closer spin-off Major Crimes should be able to keep you from grief-eating a dozen Ding Dongs.
The Closer winds down: Who can Brenda trust?
The Closer's series finale finds Brenda (Kyra Sedgwick) trying to put away slippery defense attorney — and suspected serial rapist —Phillip Stroh (Billy Burke) once and for all. And although the climax of the Stroh storyline heavily impacts Brenda's future, it's the introduction of another character — an orphaned teenage hustler named Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin) — that may ultimately prove to be most important. So much so that he'll also be a focal point of Major Crimes...
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Last December, Kyra Sedgwick could be found conducting one of her hissing interrogations, the kind riveting enough to win her a Lead Actress Emmy; the kind she usually performs in a tiny, unadorned room at LAPD headquarters. Only, for "The Last Word," the 109th and final episode ever of TNT's hit procedural The Closer, Sedgwick's Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson is prying information out of a terrified witness while standing in a puffy black parka and thick beige scarf in a remote, windy part of Griffith Park.
Since The Closer debuted in 2005, it's been...
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Taking advantage of the networks' post-sweeps lull, TNT roars back in a big way this week, with tonight's winter return (for five episodes) of its two biggest hits, The Closer and Rizzoli & Isles, and starting Tuesday for the next month, a weekly series of first-run mystery movies on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (More on that later this week.)
The Closer (8/7c) and Rizzoli (9/8c) each have similar starting points for this ...
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