Crime Procedural With Battlestar Galactica Star Has The Most Realistic Premise Ever
Following the end of Battlestar Galactica, the cast went off to new projects; Grace Park joined Hawaii 5-0, Katee Sackhoff did movies, and then settled into Longmire, but another of the main cast became the lead of their own series. Mary McDonnell, who played President Laura Roslin, went from recurring appearances on the TNT series The Closer to becoming the star of its sequel series, Major Crimes. Unlike nearly every other police procedural in history, the series focused on the worst part of law enforcement: keeping the budget under control.
A Sequel Series
The Closer starred Kyra Sedgwick as Brenda Johnson, a skilled police interrogator who was tasked with getting confessions out of suspects to reduce the workload of the Los Angeles County District Attorney. With the same cast, setting, and even sets, Major Crimes showed the fallout of Captain Sharon Raydor’s (McDonnell) cost-cutting measures. Instead of getting confessions, the unit now cuts deals with suspects, so right from the start, this team refuses to function as one.
Butting Heads With The Team
After watching seven seasons of The Closer, I was happy to spend more time with the Major Crimes Division officers, especially the crusty Detective Provenza (G.W. Bailey) and Detective Andy Flynn (Tony Denison), whom over the course of the original series, became comic relief, and then the heart of the team. “To Protect & to Serve,” a Season 2 episode of The Closer, focused on the pair, is the best episode of the series.
When Major Crimes starts out, Provenza is butting heads with Raynor before settling in as her second-in-command, but he never loses his charm.
Adding A Kid Never Works
The problem with Major Crimes isn’t that it follows the same procedural beats we’re all used to, with case-of-the-week episodes, an overarching story, and a recurring villain that when he appears, you know it’s going to be a dark episode. Instead, the series brings in Rusty (played by Graham Patrick Martin), a teenage witness eventually adopted by Raynor. No show has become better by adding a kid sidekick, and while this lets the writers include more personal drama that hadn’t been mined in The Closer, it brings down the entire series.
The Rusty Problem
In Season 1, Rusty gets to meet his birth dad; in Season 2, there’s school drama; by Season 4, he has a boyfriend. By the standards of a procedural drama, his storylines aren’t all that bad, and it’s just that none of them are why we watch these shows in the first place. That said, Rusty goes toe-to-toe in court with the serial killer’s bulldog attorney, played by Jeri Ryan, so he’s not entirely useless.
Mary McDonnell Was Finally Able To Shine
REVIEW SCORE
Major Crimes may not have reinvented the procedural genre, but by making budget concerns a part of the premise, it found a new angle to take on old stories. Fans can debate which sequel series is the best between this or The Good Fight, but I enjoyed how The Closer sequel kept stories going from one show to the next. Mary McDonnell’s Raydor, whom I hated when she first started butting heads with the Major Crimes Divison, grew on me, and the Battlestar Galactica star’s performance was exceptional from start to finish.
If you need a new procedural to binge, you can do a lot worse than Major Crimes, which is good, but far too much of a focus on Rusty for my taste. The series is available on video-on-demand through YouTube, Amazon, and AppleTV.
