The third season of the cable series,
The Closer, premiered with big numbers Monday night, bringing in an estimated 8.8 million viewers. The show’s previous season premiered with a record-setting 8.28 million people, which means that not only did the third season premiere beat its previous opening figure, it also broke the ratings record for basic cable television.
However, these records only apply to cable series that are supported by advertisements. Consequently, highly-followed shows such as the recently concluded
Sopranos, which drew in more than 13 million viewers some years ago, and HBO and ESPN’s Monday Night Football, which brought in 10 million viewers regularly last season, have not posed a threat to the ratings success of
The Closer.
The show, which was created by James Duff and Michael M. Robin, follows the story of Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, played by Golden-Globe winner
Kyra Sedgwick, as she transitions from working as the Captain of the Atlanta Police Department to heading the The Priority Homicide Squad for the Los Angeles Police Department. The squad’s main task is to handle high-profile murder cases.
In the third season’s first episode, Sedgwick’s character was shown interrogating a hospitalized young man whose family had been murdered.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Sedgwick said that shooting such interrogation scenes is “one of the hardest things” she does on
The Closer.
“(There are) just a lot of lines,” the 42-year-old actress said. It takes a long time to learn them, and I’m not a quick learner. And they’re usually shot at the end of the schedule, at the end of the week. And there’s often many ways to play them; you have a lot of choices.”
Sedgwick also said that in the current season, her character “continues to struggle with her commitment” to FBI Agent Fritz Howard (Jon Tenney), with whom she is romantically involved, and comes into conflict “with one of her favorites on the squad. They go head to head in a pretty serious way. It’s exciting and painful to watch.”
-Lisa Claustro, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Zap2it
(Photo Courtesy of People)