The Closer TV Show Still Open for Business

In TNT’s top-rated drama “The Closer,” Kyra Sedgwick plays piqued like no other. The furrowed brow, the hands to her forehead, the amusingly amplified Southern drawl.

And the season six opener has her detective character Brenda Leigh Johnson in peak piqued form thanks to a new $10 million police building, which throws her off her routines. Despite donning a cheery, flowery dress, she kicks boxes, attacks an errant remote control and bitches to her boss Will Pope, played with bemused restraint by J.K. Simmons.

“Cops aren’t happy unless they’re miserable,” Pope notes, before asking Brenda, “Do I look fat?”

In the episode airing Monday at 9 p.m., she points to a sign that reads “Hard Interview Room” and asks,”What message is that supposed to send to suspects?” Pope shrug his shoulders: “It’s supposed to be intimidating.”

“I decide when to intimidate people around here,” she yelps, “not the building!”Sedgwick, in a phone interview from her home in New York last month, admits that any change makes her Georgia-based character “a bit cranky. I love being able to play that.”

Said crankiness is often comedic. Later in the episode, she dumps a cardboard box filled with mini chocolates into a desk drawer in front of wide-eyed visitors connected to a murder case.

“She really needs that chocolate,” Sedgwick said. “She is so into her addiction, she can normalize an abnormal situation.”

There’s nothing abnormal about the popularity of “The Closer,” the top basic cable series last year, averaging about 7 million viewers. “Monk.” “Burn Notice.” “Mad Men.” They haven’t come close.

Sedgwick is the primary reason and her peers know it: she’s earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding actress in a drama five years in a row.

“I’m amazed by how fresh the story lines are,” said Eric Dodd, a 46-year-old Atlanta TV news writer and producer. “And Kyra Sedgwick’s nuanced performance makes the series soar.”

Last year, he enjoyed Sedgwick’s real-life 18-year-old daughter Sosie Bacon playing her petulant niece. The story blurred fiction and reality for Sedgwick because Sosie was about to go to college. In the show, the niece was going home after an extended stay with Brenda and her husband Fritz.

“There was one moment in her last episode when she looked at me,” Sedgwick said. “She said, ‘Don’t you want me to stay? It was confusing. This was her last year at home. I’ve had to go through the process of letting go and pondering life without her. I started to cry. I lost it as Brenda. But it was a little bit of Kyra, too.”

Even after 75 episodes, Sedgwick said she’s not at all bored playing Brenda: “I feel like every new situation brings out something new in her. She’s constantly surprising me.”

On TV
“The Closer,” 9 p.m. Mondays, starting July 12