TV is the New Reading

TNT explodes with the return of 'The Closer,' 'Saving Grace'

Her one-time affair with Chief Pope -- the astonishing J.K.Simmons -- added some intrigue in early seasons with her burgeoning relationship with Jon Tenney’s FBI Special Agent Fritz Howard -- oh yeah, they’re married now -- and she makes full use of that relationship to accomplish her goals.

She has a forthright nature and lack of diplomacy that has made enemies within the police department and within the district attorney’s office and in other law enforcement divisions but what makes her a great character is her determined nature to avenge murders and bring murderers to justice. She will step on roomfuls of toes to accomplish that.

The other thing is she is extraordinarily good at her job. She may have a tin ear for diplomacy and her personal life may be in constant disarray, but she has oceandepths of skills and subtlety in extracting information from suspects and persons of interest. Catching people in lies requires more that one set of eyes and ears and her team of Sgt. Gabriel, Lt. Provenza, Lt. Flynn, Lt. Tau, Lt. Sanchez, until recently Det. Daniels, and her inimitable tech guy Buzz has helped her out in countless ways over the run of the series.

Now in its fifth season, the show is off to a pretty good start. Brenda and Fritz are settling into their new house and seem to be enjoying each other in an old married couple kind of way, and the new division’s purview seems to be working out as she’s looked into kidnappings and theft as well as homicides. The structure of the story doesn’t usually telegraph the whodunits although the means by which she puts the final piece in place is often clumsier than it needs to be.

That being said, Sedgwick is incredibly charismatic as a lead investigator and as I’ve said in the past, I would hate to know something she needed to find out. As her character herself has said, as hard as a secret is to uncover, it’s even harder to keep.

Saving Grace

Holly Hunter as Det. Grace Hanadarko with the Oklahoma City Police Department may be touched by an angel but she’s handled far more than that by many more men. And despite the party girl attitude that put her on Earl’s radar as her last-chance angel, circumstances in her life including the loss of a sister in the Oklahoma City bombing and her brother’s service as a priest seem to lend some insight into her character. A drunken incident behind the wheel convinced her she’d killed a pedestrian who in fact was serving out a sentence on death row and Earl’s intervention linked his story with hers.

Grace isn’t just running around advocating for death row inmates, seeing angels and sleeping with every man she encounters -- although she has no objection to flashing the neighbors occasionally -- she is laying in some emotional foundations with her partner Ham Dewey played by Kenny Johnson, who might still be married -- I don’t know where he and Darlene are in those divorce proceedings. She told him she sees angels as a joke when he confronted her after Earl led her to a girl who led the police to a terror plot and saved a hundred lives, but her best friend Rhetta played by Laura San Giacomo, a forensics tech, has been an Earl groupie from way back, analyzing a few bits of Earl paraphernalia that can’t be explained except supernaturally.

Meanwhile she and the rest of the division prank on each other endlessly and have a real family relationship -- something they seem to need in that every time anyone’s real family shows up there seems to be a lot of conflict. And it seems to work out pretty well for Grace to live alone with her bulldog. Earl shows up occasionally to confront her about a lack of faith and to nudge her along, but he also cares about her far beyond the dogma.

One really refreshing aspect about this show is the lack of judgment in a context of spirituality. People are who they are because they are as God made them, and God loves everyone where they are at. They make mistakes -- grand, epic, flagrantly self-destructive mistakes -- and one message of this show is that it’s OK to live your life as the person you are. Forgiveness and reconciliation are real, they provide the basis for stronger relationships and the hardest and healthiest thing people can to when they’ve made a mistake is to forgive themselves, start over and try to do better.

This underlying message gets hazy in the exuberant nudity and middlebrow humor and while people might put themselves right with God they might occasionally have to still do some time. But at its core, “Saving Grace” explores a loving, exciting, interactive relationship between God and humanity, a God who loves and cares about us and what’s going on in our lives and who has a plan for us.

And if you can get past all the rampant humanity going on left and right in this show, there’s a story there that’s generally fulfilling and satisfying and nicely avoids being explicitly preachy.

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