Post by Naj on Jun 13, 2005 9:10:50 GMT -5
Cracking Cases (and Superiors) With More Than Good Looks
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: June 13, 2005
It's raining Hitchcock blondes.
"The Closer," on TNT tonight, is the third new drama this year featuring a cool, beautiful homicide investigator with uncanny intuition. Kyra Sedgwick plays Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson, a Southern bellwether recruited from Atlanta to head a special crimes unit in Los Angeles, displacing seasoned officers. She rides roughshod over their resentment ("If I liked being called a b*tch to my face," she tells one insolent colleague, "I'd still be married."), relying on her keener intelligence and eerie interrogative skills.
Female detectives are in fashion again on television, but there is a marked difference between today's women in blue and the feisty, hardened professionals who fought their way up the ladder from "Cagney and Lacey" in the early 80's to Helen Mirren on "Prime Suspect" and Mariska Hargitay's character on "Law and Order: SVU." Those women mirror the feminist ethos of the past - dedicated, seasoned and tough. Now, the new female investigators are not just equal to their male peers; they are superior in a spooky, almost supernatural way. They seem like post-feminist role models, women who use their special abilities to lead men, without sacrificing their femininity.
Actually, the blond detective trend is not so much the triumph of postfeminism as a return to the prefeminist fantasies of 60's and 70's sitcoms like "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," where heroines had secret, magical powers that allowed them to guide and manipulate men. "The Closer," like three predecessors - "The Inside" on Fox, NBC's "Medium" and CBS's "Cold Case" - are "Bewitched" with a badge and decomposing bodies.
On "The Inside," which had its premiere last week, young, exquisite Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) is recruited to work as a profiler in an elite special crimes unit of the F.B.I. in Los Angeles, even though she is only two years out of the bureau's academy at Quantico, Va. Rebecca has special insights forged in childhood pain - the Clarice Starling school of detective work - and her empathic skills break open dead-end cases. Which brings us to "Medium," NBC's hit drama that began earlier this year and stars Patricia Arquette as a psychic who helps the police track down killers. And that show might never have been picked up without the success of "Cold Case," which had its debut in 2003 on CBS, a police drama centered around the cerebral perspicuity of its pale, enigmatic heroine, played by Kathryn Morris.
On the surface, at least, "The Closer," seems closest to the old model. Brenda Johnson is a mature divorcée and experienced detective, and she can be as bossy and strong-minded as any man. But she wields her Southern accent like a wand, using honeyed sarcasm to confound men and antebellum flattery to beguile and disarm suspects. She also slept with the boss (oops). It turns out that she had a steamy affair with Assistant Police Chief Will Pope (J. K. Simmons), a married man, and it is he who engineers her transfer.
The pilot's mutilated corpse and offbeat clues are intriguing, and Ms. Sedgwick has a compelling screen presence, though her accent is too generic to pass as authentic. Perhaps to add some humor, Brenda has a secret vice that she hides from her colleagues: a sweet tooth. Throughout the pilot, she looks yearningly at donuts, then resolutely resists. In the last scene, alone in her bedroom, she unwraps a chocolate-covered snack cake and sensuously devours it. The weakness is supposed to be endearing, but it mainly seems forced.
"The Inside" borrows shamelessly from "Silence of the Lambs," but it is more entertaining than "The Closer." The Fox show's appeal does not really lie with its heroine, who has a glassy stare and a hypersensitivity reminiscent of the "precogs" floating in a tank in the Tom Cruise science fiction thriller "Minority Report." (Though she can also be astoundingly obtuse: she is constantly venturing alone into scary dark places where serial killers lurk.)
Mainly, Peter Coyote adds a refreshing touch of evil as the mysterious boss, Virgil (Web) Webster, who is feared, loathed and respected by his agents. Webster alone knows Rebecca's secret - she was abducted as a child and escaped her kidnapper after 18 months in captivity - and decides to use her special insights to solve difficult crimes. He also has his own reasons for recruiting the three other agents on his team. Handsome, brooding Paul (Jay Harrington) tells Rebecca he is his bosses' "conscience." Red-headed Melody (Katie Finneran) may well have been chosen for comic relief. She is the office's Eve Arden figure, making sardonic jokes at the expense of her dull-witted partner, Danny (Adam Baldwin.)
While investigating the location of a murder, Danny asks her, "Is it an S&M club?" Melody retorts: "No, it's a support group for very clumsy people."
Blondes have less fun.
source: NYTIMES
(edited thread title)
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: June 13, 2005
It's raining Hitchcock blondes.
"The Closer," on TNT tonight, is the third new drama this year featuring a cool, beautiful homicide investigator with uncanny intuition. Kyra Sedgwick plays Deputy Police Chief Brenda Johnson, a Southern bellwether recruited from Atlanta to head a special crimes unit in Los Angeles, displacing seasoned officers. She rides roughshod over their resentment ("If I liked being called a b*tch to my face," she tells one insolent colleague, "I'd still be married."), relying on her keener intelligence and eerie interrogative skills.
Female detectives are in fashion again on television, but there is a marked difference between today's women in blue and the feisty, hardened professionals who fought their way up the ladder from "Cagney and Lacey" in the early 80's to Helen Mirren on "Prime Suspect" and Mariska Hargitay's character on "Law and Order: SVU." Those women mirror the feminist ethos of the past - dedicated, seasoned and tough. Now, the new female investigators are not just equal to their male peers; they are superior in a spooky, almost supernatural way. They seem like post-feminist role models, women who use their special abilities to lead men, without sacrificing their femininity.
Actually, the blond detective trend is not so much the triumph of postfeminism as a return to the prefeminist fantasies of 60's and 70's sitcoms like "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," where heroines had secret, magical powers that allowed them to guide and manipulate men. "The Closer," like three predecessors - "The Inside" on Fox, NBC's "Medium" and CBS's "Cold Case" - are "Bewitched" with a badge and decomposing bodies.
On "The Inside," which had its premiere last week, young, exquisite Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) is recruited to work as a profiler in an elite special crimes unit of the F.B.I. in Los Angeles, even though she is only two years out of the bureau's academy at Quantico, Va. Rebecca has special insights forged in childhood pain - the Clarice Starling school of detective work - and her empathic skills break open dead-end cases. Which brings us to "Medium," NBC's hit drama that began earlier this year and stars Patricia Arquette as a psychic who helps the police track down killers. And that show might never have been picked up without the success of "Cold Case," which had its debut in 2003 on CBS, a police drama centered around the cerebral perspicuity of its pale, enigmatic heroine, played by Kathryn Morris.
On the surface, at least, "The Closer," seems closest to the old model. Brenda Johnson is a mature divorcée and experienced detective, and she can be as bossy and strong-minded as any man. But she wields her Southern accent like a wand, using honeyed sarcasm to confound men and antebellum flattery to beguile and disarm suspects. She also slept with the boss (oops). It turns out that she had a steamy affair with Assistant Police Chief Will Pope (J. K. Simmons), a married man, and it is he who engineers her transfer.
The pilot's mutilated corpse and offbeat clues are intriguing, and Ms. Sedgwick has a compelling screen presence, though her accent is too generic to pass as authentic. Perhaps to add some humor, Brenda has a secret vice that she hides from her colleagues: a sweet tooth. Throughout the pilot, she looks yearningly at donuts, then resolutely resists. In the last scene, alone in her bedroom, she unwraps a chocolate-covered snack cake and sensuously devours it. The weakness is supposed to be endearing, but it mainly seems forced.
"The Inside" borrows shamelessly from "Silence of the Lambs," but it is more entertaining than "The Closer." The Fox show's appeal does not really lie with its heroine, who has a glassy stare and a hypersensitivity reminiscent of the "precogs" floating in a tank in the Tom Cruise science fiction thriller "Minority Report." (Though she can also be astoundingly obtuse: she is constantly venturing alone into scary dark places where serial killers lurk.)
Mainly, Peter Coyote adds a refreshing touch of evil as the mysterious boss, Virgil (Web) Webster, who is feared, loathed and respected by his agents. Webster alone knows Rebecca's secret - she was abducted as a child and escaped her kidnapper after 18 months in captivity - and decides to use her special insights to solve difficult crimes. He also has his own reasons for recruiting the three other agents on his team. Handsome, brooding Paul (Jay Harrington) tells Rebecca he is his bosses' "conscience." Red-headed Melody (Katie Finneran) may well have been chosen for comic relief. She is the office's Eve Arden figure, making sardonic jokes at the expense of her dull-witted partner, Danny (Adam Baldwin.)
While investigating the location of a murder, Danny asks her, "Is it an S&M club?" Melody retorts: "No, it's a support group for very clumsy people."
Blondes have less fun.
source: NYTIMES
(edited thread title)
