Lost and Veronica Mars aside, some of the finest dramas air on television hail from the U.S. specialty channels. Two of the finest presently air here on Wednesday nights, directly opposite each other, on channels that anyone with cable can access. They are both running several months behind their U.S. air dates, but you don't need a complicated satellite hook-up -- or a second mortgage -- to see them.
The Closer is yet another police procedural, but this one is sleek and intelligent -- quiet where others are noisy, stylish where the others are messy. Its focus is the psychology of interrogation, from the interrogator's point of view, and it gives its audience credit for real intelligence. It's film noir as television. Kyra Sedgwick is a force of nature as a Southern belle-wether recruited from Atlanta to supervise a Los Angeles homicide unit staffed with competent, headstrong men who resent her intrusion.
The Closer begins with Sedgwick, however; with her cool, unflappable demeanour and deceptively sweet Southern charm, she's both intriguing and compelling -- a Hitchcock blonde, updated to the modern age.
It helps, too, that The Closer is skilfully and intelligently written, despite its overly familiar police trappings. Made-for-cable dramas are more adult than network shows -- they take more chances, they're better made and they're often more intense. They're more like films than TV, and Sedgwick fits right in.
The Closer's plots are secondary to its characters -- another defining characteristic of cable dramas-- but story is often what makes viewers tune in.
Similar milieu, different treatment. The Shield takes the slash-and-burn approach to TV cop-land, but it isn't nearly as trashy as it sounds. Gritty, grim and utterly realistic, The Shield airs at the same time as The Closer, forcing devotees of the genre -- those who don't have access to a VCR, anyway -- to choose.
The Shield's fourth season, which introduced Glenn Close's newly installed squad commander as Vic Mackey's (Emmy winner Michael Chiklis) latest boss and foil, aired earlier this year on the U.S. cable channel FX. A fifth season, without Close, is due in January.
Close's episodes debuted in Canada last month; tonight's episode, in which Close's character butts heads with newly promoted precinct captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), is the fifth of 13.
Tonight's outing features The Shield's signature snappy throwaways -- "Let's talk to Methadone Man," is a fast 'n' funny reference to the rapper Method Man -- and the usual boss-employee confrontations ("Hey, press conference hasn't started yet," Mackey jeers at Aceveda at one point. "You still got time to figure out how to take credit for all this").
A TV classic! The very first Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, which originally aired on Oct. 24, 1990, kicks off 13 nights of pre-Halloween Treehouse reruns on the Comedy Network.
The opener, in which Bart and Lisa swap scary stories in the tree house while Homer eavesdrops outside, seems almost quaint by today's Simpsons standards, but it has its moments. Marge's familial observation, for example, that: "This family has had its differences and we've squabbled, but we've never had knife fights before. I blame this house."
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