I’m catching up with all you cable-equipped folks. We can rent TV shows on DVD via Netflix so we’re watching TV like the rest of you, except a season or two behind.
We’re 3 DVDs deep into the first season of The Closer. In the first few shows she was tough as nails but could switch on a sympathetic side in the interview room; aside from not being able to navigate Los Angeles worth a damn and having some apparent snack-food issues, she came to kick butt and take names, many of the butts and names belonging to people on her uncooperative staff.
By Disk 2, they seemed to be making her ditzier, more whiny than confrontational with the LAPD folks who were messing with her. In Disk 3 she’s adopting fluffy kitty cats, Pope is rescuing her from insubordinate underlings instead her doing it herself, and she’s doing unprofessionally ditzy things like letting a rape/murder suspect getting hauled in for questioning go off into a room by himself to get a shirt (he shoots himself). Oh, and she’s gone from “can’t navigate LA” to “can’t parallel park without crashing into other cars”. :rolleyes:
Without plot-spoiling: does her character bounce back from this and regain some of the brass and starch, or does she continue to slide towards a cross between Adrian Monk and Lucy Ricardo?
Do you really think she’s slipping? Dumb question - of course you do. You give supporting facts and such.
I don’t see it as she’s slipping, but more like she’s just out of her depth in the city, and other people were giving her the benefit of the doubt until now. There’s a level of politics in her new job that wasn’t there back East (and remember, it’s implied (I’ve missed a couple episodes, so it may have been more than implied) that she was outmaneuvered politically there to make her leave). And now she and her FBI guy are trying to buy a house, and do a lot of things that make them a more domestic couple. This takes up a lot of her time that she used to use at work (when she just rented a room.)
My daughter and I love this show. We view it as a woman who is extremely good at her job, but not so good at her personal life, Fritz (rowr) nothwithstanding.
She looks disorganized, trying to juggle fourteen things in her hands, but look out when she gets you in the interrogation room, and she can figure out the “hook” to a case where no one else could.
I’m also glad she toned down the lipstick. That fire-engine red is all wrong for her (as Kyra Sedgewick said in a magazine article I read recently.)
there will be scenes coming up that will restore your faith in her ability to command… but I think alot of her ‘juggling’ things in front of folks is to keep them off guard - especially the suspects.
and iirc, the ‘car accident’ wasn’t paralel parking, but her backing out of a space - not that that makes it any better -
She hasn’t lost any of her edge in the interrogation room, but her relationship with Fritz has definitely softened her edges a little–not to mention that her group of detectives, originally quite antagonistic, have become extremely loyal, so there is much more comraderie now, too.
I love this show, and I think Brenda has been pretty steadily crazy throughout, with a wild contrast between her competence in the interrogation room and her near inability to handle her personal life. I find it endearing.
In the new episodes she’s definitely been a serious hard-ass on a few occasions - like when she badgered that kid until he said he wanted to kill himself, so that she could keep him under suicide watch rather than lose custody of him.
Only a couple of things go too far for me: that a 40-yr-old woman is so terrified of her father finding out about her boyfriend, and that a woman with that kind of sweet tooth weighs about 105 pounds.