The fourth season of “The Closer” gets off to a fiery start as L.A.P.D. Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) hunts for an arsonist who has set Los Angeles’ Griffith Park ablaze. The inferno leaves several people dead. “They don’t have fires like that in Atlanta,” says Sedgwick, referring to her character’s hometown.”
The bodies are so badly burned that one victim’s skin must be removed from her hand, rehydrated and fit on Johnson’s hand in order to get fingerprints.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Sedgwick remarks.Filmed on location, the episode is the most ambitious, movie-like season premiere yet for the hit TNT cop drama. “The Closer” has spawned a host of imitators and turned summer TV into a playground for tough-talking, hard-boiled women, The deeply flawed yet charming Johnson registers so powerfully with the audience that women stop Sedgwick on the streets of New York, where she lives with her husband Kevin Bacon, to sing her praises.
“They look at me with misty eyes, they tell me that they love her,” says Sedgwick, a film actress starring her first TV series. “It was so important that if I was going to do TV that I play someone who was accessible. People really relate to her because she’s in a struggle all the time. She’s a human being. I don’t see the point of coming into people’s living room if they can’t relate to you.”
Sedgwick’s work has already won her a Golden Globe, the award that’s always one or two seasons ahead of the more conservative Emmys. The actress enjoys the unusual position of having imput on the direction of the series. “I’m interested in the possibility of going up against a female antagonist,” she says. “Someone in the L.A.P.D. or a next-door neighbor or a landlord. Someone that’s consistently in her life.”
The one person who’s consistently in Brenda’s life is her fiance Fritz Howard, played Jon Tenney. Sedgwick says she faces another challenge with that relationship this season.
“She faces the issue of having children.
The biological clock is ticking,” she says. “This is the year about power, Brenda’s need to control.”
THE CLOSER
Monday, 9 p.m., TNT