TV actress gets real kudos from NY Times

Not often a TV actress gets a rave review from an august publication like The NY Times. But here it happens. I've watched the show: she's really good, plays against her glamor. Kind of like a female Columbo.

'The Closer's' Kyra Sedgwick, a Study in Nuance
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

If you want to find out what a woman is made of, send an enormous arrangement of flowers to her office. She'll instantly have to field an onslaught of mental states, including surprise, pride, humility, vulnerability and aggravation. Big bouquets are unwieldy: they invite questions and jealousy and pity, and they sit awkwardly among the cubicles of a standard office. It's hard to be professional among too many flowers.

Siccing flowers on someone is also a good way to find out if she can act. Last week "The Closer," the crime drama that returned to TNT for its second season last month, confronted its flagrantly uncool lead, Brenda Leigh Johnson ( Kyra Sedgwick ), with a blizzard of roses, daisies and lilies. The suitcase-size delivery interrupted the confident banter of Brenda, the deputy police chief, and her homicide division at their Los Angeles headquarters, compelling her to forfeit her authority, affect graciousness, assume the floral burden and trundle back to her private office with the hedge. There she checked the card — yup, her boyfriend — and finally stared dolefully at the flowers, head in hands.

Flowers. We get it. She's good with interrogations, bad with compliments. Good with corpses, bad with love. But Ms. Sedgwick, who was nominated last week for an Emmy for her portrayal, has brought nuance, cunning and idiosyncrasy to Brenda's divided competencies. She often uses her character's bewildered interaction with the material world — the flowers, and notably Brenda's cavernous black hole of a pocketbook — to shade the role.

What makes a great television actress? Stage acting and film acting are often contrasted: as they say of China and Japan, one is very big and the other very small. But television acting is an altogether different enterprise. Accomplished without much rehearsal, homework or even direction, television acting, especially in soap operas and sitcoms, can become nothing but the hitting of marks. To be sure, at any given time the floor of the police department set of "The Closer" is pocked with colored gaffer tape, the small T's that show an actor where to put his toes and which way to angle his body. On last week's episode, "Aftertaste," the off-screen tape would have been used to show Ms. Sedgwick where to cross and stop as she debriefed her staff about a recent murder.

But acting on a drama like "The Closer" is more than gaffer tape. Dramatic leads like Ms. Sedgwick — or Kiefer Sutherland on "24" or Edie Falco on "The Sopranos" — work extremely long days, often late into the night. While shooting, they are chronically exhausted, and much of their time between takes is spent conserving energy. A television set is therefore rigidly hierarchical, with the overworked leads given a wide berth by the crew and the lesser cast. After all, they must more than anyone manage the stop-and-start of television shoots without losing the thread of the plot and their performance. They have to keep focused even as the crew is mercilessly manipulating them with blocking and then racing them through shoots so everyone can accomplish all that needs to be done.

The job of television leads is still more complex because they rarely have time to commit their lines to memory; instead, they are typically fed dialogue between scenes. Moreover, they don't have many takes to get a line reading right, and minimal on-set work is done to ensure continuity — that sense of visual flow and verisimilitude that moviemakers take pride in.

To supply the illusion of continuity where none is assured, then, an actor has to be able to bring herself unerringly back to the same note — same voice, same gait, same tics — every time she is in character. In a successful drama, she will be required to find this note on cue day after day, year after year, for possibly hundreds of hours of airtime. If the note is actually a tricky chord, with lots of harmony, even some dissonance, it can become exceedingly hard to hit.

Because of this difficulty, great television actors wisely keep their characters comfortable and within easy reach, often playing versions of themselves (Lauren Graham in "Gilmore Girls"), commedia dell'arte archetypes ( Denis Leary on "Rescue Me") or a touch of both (Kevin James in "The King of Queens"). Comfort and ease suit the mostly homebound medium well: people in their living rooms like their small-screen friends relaxing, familiar and mostly predictable. For this reason, television acting is often dismissed by movie snobs as either too uninflected or too broad.

Ms. Sedgwick, who has taken the risk of not being comfortable on "The Closer," errs on the broad side, and that's a good choice, as she enlivens what could have been a by-the-numbers procedural. But Brenda also represents a reach for Ms. Sedgwick: she is stammery, addicted to sugar, socially annoying and — above all — reflexively but insincerely polite and kind. She also has a big, bendy Southern accent that is not native to the actress. She slathers other people with lines like, "I'm so, so sorry" and "Thank you so, so much." And when her serpentine interrogations compel confessions from sympathetic and lawyer-less people (including, this season, a man whose young son had cancer and a victim of elder abuse) she seems borderline cruel.

None of Brenda's dark, bothersome side comes through in the print advertisements for "The Closer," of course, because Ms. Sedgwick in photographs can easily be made to look like a regular InStyle television belle. She is certainly attractive enough for it, as well as slim and streaky-blond. But when she is animated and in character, she works tirelessly against the loveliness of her face, confidently playing up its homely dimensions to create a curious and perceptive character whose lifework is squinting, staring and straining to see. In spite of what other female television detectives might have you believe, constant study of bodies and documents does not soften the lines of the face, plump the lips or retard aging. Instead, a good-looking detective might, at 40, look plausibly like Brenda, whose face appears permanently creased with concern and perplexity and whose nervous eyes are evidently more used to peering than being gazed into.

Because Ms. Sedgwick, whose background is in movies, is not a small-screen pro like Mr. James, she has had to use a little commedia with Brenda, and she is un-self-conscious enough to really go for it. With the pocketbook wrestling and the accent, there is inevitably scenery-chewing, but in general the performance is defined by gusto and lack of vanity.

Ms. Sedgwick has cited Helen Mirren's showpiece character, Jane Tennison (on "Prime Suspect"), as her inspiration for Brenda. Like Ms. Mirren, Ms. Sedgwick has somehow managed to incorporate the practical challenges of television acting into her performance. In fact, Brenda's balance of nervousness, virtuosity, arrogance, self-effacement, prettiness and neuroticism elegantly reflect the character of television itself. Now if she can get viewers comfortable with her discomfort, Ms. Sedgwick will not only win an Emmy, she'll also carry "The Closer" all the way to syndication, that state of television grace.