dream jobs; Joan Juliet Buck tracks those intrepid souls who seek the truth.(Xiara's Song and The Closer)(Movie Review)(Television Program Review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

I got rid of the flies, maggots, and ants," says the coroner. The body on the floor of the bedroom is a bloody battered mess, the home owner is on holiday in Hawaii, the cops are grim, the secretary's in shock, the housekeeper's in tears. Then a blonde in a regrettable camel cardigan, a mask held over her mouth, says in a backwoods Georgia drawl, "Looks like love," gets down on the floor to sniff the carpet, announces that someone threw up and used detergent to clean it up. When the coroner complains that "some asshole" has insisted on a point of procedure, she sweetly says, "That asshole would be me," and before the first scene is over she has declared, "If I liked being called a bitch to my face, I'd still be married."

TNT's The Closer debuts on June 13, and the name does not mean nearer. It means effective. Brenda Johnson is an insecure and lonely belle from Atlanta who is also, per her boss, "a CIA-trained interrogator with excellent references from the police department and a reputation for getting confessions that lead directly to convictions." She's been brought to Los Angeles as deputy police chief. Kyra Sedgwick-the tender girlfriend from Born on the Fourth of July, the star of many small movies, and the wife of Kevin Bacon-takes on the crusty, edgy, and infinitely appealing role of important detective as sensitive but lethal oddball. Helen Mirren's Detective superintendent Jane Tennison was the model for the genre in the BBC's Prime Suspect. Kyra Sedgwick plays the contrast between the noble but distasteful quest for villains and the female frailties of vanity and desire with a relish and a mastery that make her performance a joy.

Brenda Johnson is awkward and vulnerable, endlessly sucking on candy, mesmerized by doughnuts and dessert. You know she's fighting something in herself even as she goes into focused mode to choose her outfit for interrogating the suspect. A hair twirler (a former compulsive eater? Smoker? Drunk? Addict? Nympho?), she has a relationship with her boss the police chief (J. K. Simmons, curiously attractive despite lemony expressions and bald pate), who suddenly caves when every one of the cops working for her wants to quit, and suggests that she might ...