Above: Pentel Pocket Brush Pen Sketch in my 9 x 12 inch Fabriano Venezia in-studio journal. Click on the image to view an enlargement.
It's over. I'm not happy about that at all. I have enjoyed spending an hour each week with the characters on "The Closer." There have been times, when like any fan, I have disagreed with the way storylines veered but overall I was so happy with the show I was dreading its end. The characters have had "real life" and interconnection and because of that (and my wildly active imagination) I have become invested in them.
That and they all have interesting faces. I enjoy sketching them late at night.
I've been a bit troubled about the wind down and the way the character of Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson has become a bit more erratic and emotional as the stresses around her have mounted. But I can forgive that too.
What leaves me puzzled, as we move into "Major Crimes" the spin-off show that includes most of the original cast and features Mary McDonnell's character Capt. Sharon Raydor as the lead of the division after Johnson's departure, is how there was no follow through to find Rusty's parents (you know who this is if you watch the shows).
I find it inconceivable that Johnson would leave to go and take care of her ailing father in Georgia, without first trying to find, or organizing an effort to find Rusty's parents. She promised and the circumstances of that promise were so vital to her own self-realization.
So the new show, "Major Crimes," begins with a couple handicaps: No Chief Johnson and a certain lack of continuity. Additionally the focus of the division is now on plea bargaining as an effort to dispense justice more efficiently and economically.
Like Lt. Provenza I'm not in agreement with that. The old mode had its dangers and pools of quicksand (into which Johnson stepped), but I will need to be convinced that plea bargaining can be transparent enough to satisfy my sense of "justice." (Which is after all why we watch crime shows isn't it, to see things neatly put up in a package that real life doens't give us?)
And I have another reservation. I don't believe plea bargaining is inherently as dramatic as the previous show's "methods."
But I'll watch for the first season and see what's what. Even if I don't get satiation dramatically I will still be able to see and sketch my two favorite characters.
Below: Det. Julio Sanchez on one of the final episodes of "The Closer." (From the same journal as above, also with a Pentel Pocket Brush pen.) Click on the image to view an enlargement.
