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Critic's Notebook
If you want to find out what a woman is made of, send an enormous arrangement of flowers to her office. She'll instantly have to field an onslaught of mental states, including surprise, pride, humility, vulnerability and aggravation. Big bouquets are unwieldy: they invite questions and jealousy and pity, and they sit awkwardly among the cubicles of a standard office. It's hard to be professional among too many flowers.
Siccing flowers on someone is also a good way to find out if she can act. Last week "The Closer," the crime drama that returned to TNT for its second season last month, confronted its flagrantly uncool lead, Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick), with a blizzard of roses, daisies and lilies. The suitcase-size delivery interrupted the confident banter of Brenda, the deputy police chief, and her homicide division at their Los Angeles headquarters, compelling her to forfeit her authority, affect graciousness, assume the floral burden and trundle back to her private office with the hedge. There she checked the card — yup, her boyfriend — and finally stared dolefully at the flowers, head in hands.
Flowers. We get it. She's good with interrogations, bad with compliments. Good with corpses, bad with love. But Ms. Sedgwick, who was nominated last week for an Emmy for her portrayal, has brought nuance, cunning and idiosyncrasy to Brenda's divided competencies. She often uses her character's bewildered interaction with the material world — the flowers, and notably Brenda's cavernous black hole of a pocketbook — to shade the role.
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What makes a great television actress? Stage acting and film acting are often contrasted: as they say of China and Japan, one is very big and the other very small. But television acting is an altogether different enterprise. Accomplished without much rehearsal, homework or even direction, television acting, especially in soap operas and sitcoms, can become nothing but the hitting of marks. To be sure, at any given time the floor of the police department set of "The Closer" is pocked with colored gaffer tape, the small T's that show an actor where to put his toes and which way to angle his body. On last week's episode, "Aftertaste," the off-screen tape would have been used to show Ms. Sedgwick where to cross and stop as she debriefed her staff about a recent murder.
But acting on a drama like "The Closer" is more than gaffer tape. Dramatic leads like Ms. Sedgwick — or Kiefer Sutherland on "24" or Edie Falco on "The Sopranos" — work extremely long days, often late into the night. While shooting, they are chronically exhausted, and much of their time between takes is spent conserving energy. A television set is therefore rigidly hierarchical, with the overworked leads given a wide berth by the crew and the lesser cast. After all, they must more than anyone manage the stop-and-start of television shoots without losing the thread of the plot and their performance. They have to keep focused even as the crew is mercilessly manipulating them with blocking and then racing them through shoots so everyone can accomplish all that needs to be done.
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