THE CLOSER

In baseball, a closer is a pitcher who can take over when the starter begins to lose his oomph; usually, after ninety pitches or so. As TNT's The Closer premiers its fifth season, (Mondays 9:00 PM Eastern) at the question is, does Kyra Sedgewick's character still have, ahem, legs?

By now we know the premise: a talented and quirkily beautiful southern woman arrives in L.A. to lead a team of homicide20detectives. Her private life is a confusion of lost keys and furtive chocolate, but professionally Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson is tops. If a closer in baseball saves the game with strikeouts, this police Closer always, always gets a confession by the end of a show, thank you, thank you very much.

It's a rework of classic drawing room endings. Hercule or Charlie or Nero gathers suspects together and, after much questioning, unmasks the killer. The real reason for all those people is to demonstrate the brilliance of the Great Detective.

Brenda uses an interview room, not a living room, but she has her own Greek chorus consisting of pretty much the entire cast. They gather b ehind the two way mirror, whispering sweet somethings into her earpiece and praising the Great Detective's cunning to any doubters present.

For the last couple of seasons, Brenda has discovered fashion, replacing southern flounce with wonderful looking clothing. While my southern wife tells me that Sedgewick's accent is fine, (the actress grew up in New York City,) Atlanta women do not dress country.

But the character is usually fun, and we actually like to see her blundering through her love life with F.B.I. Special Agent Fritz Howard, played with Job-like patience by Jon Tenni. [Recurring roles in CSI and Will & Grace.] That is testimony to consistently good writing. I mean, I20never gave a rat's south end about Cagney and Lacey's private lives: let’s get back to the action. But at home Brenda Leigh always seems about to hack up a furball, and that's worth waiting for.

In last year's finale the couple managed to carve out enough time between cases to get married. It was funny and touching. But the season opener, “Products of Discovery,” written by Michael Alaimo, disappoints.

A family of four is found murdered execution style. The husband/suspect actually mentions that he doesn't allow sweets in the house a couple of T.V. minutes after a chocolate bar is pointed out at the crime scene. Wow, what a break, to have a key clue appear just then! Are there any red herrings, or did I blink? We know by long television tradition that the first suspect is usually innocent, so that doesn't count. Its part of the structure, just like we know that when a cameraman places a door in the shooting frame, somebody will walk through it.

The heavy-handed clues lead to the real killer after a jurisdictional triangle between Brenda's Major Crimes Division and the F.B.I. that puts poor Fritzi yet again in the hypotenuse. But my couch mate and I were way ahead of Brenda at every turn, even when she does her stuff in a prison visitation booth instead of back at headquarters.

I don't mind formulaic cop shows. Done well, they're like jazzman Ramsey Lewis finding yet another variant of Billy Boy: pleasingly different within the structure. But we knew who done it two commercials before Brenda caught on, and that just isn't much fun.

Worse, Brenda's first episode as a married woman could have been delightfully chaotic, but all the show could offer was a subplot about Kitty. Brenda still hasn't found time to name the cat, still refers to her as a him, and doesn't recognize that the obviously healthy and content feline is, in reality, sick. Will Kitty survive her trip to the vet, or will we discover that she has nine lives?

I love the series, but just hope that this new season of The Closer isn't running out of pitches.

The Guru - Michael S. Jones