Major Crimes Season 2: Still on the case (and our DVR)

Major Crimes returns to TNT for its second season on June 10. We were huge fans of The Closer (until its last season when the world came crashing down on Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) and Interim Chief of Police Will Pope (J.K. Simmons) exited to do State Farm commercials.  While the quirks of hard-nosed by-the-book Captain Raydor (Mary McDonnell) are nowhere near as endearing or colorful as those of her predecessor, she’s proving to be a slow burn, gradually gaining our appreciation as she makes the rules work to her advantage.

Whopperjaw got a preview of the first episode of the new season. In terms of structure, it’s clearly trying to parallel the more successful elements of the initial series. Raydor is the smart, driven central figure and Rusty, her witness/charge/”foster son” is a stand-in for her “real world” that is connected to, but not fully part of, her life fighting crime. (He’s fulfilling the role Fritzy and family played for Johnson in the original series.)  The show appears to be setting up the Deputy District Attorney Emma Rios (Nadine Velazquez) to assume Raydor’s former position as the hard-to-like, oft antagonist. However Valazquez (let us save you the time it took us to place her before we gave up and searched IMDB; among other roles she played the maid on My Name is Earl) has a difficult time pulling it off. She’s out-performed by virtually every member of the extensive cast.

Still, the story draws you in at the get-go, starting with the body of a film director’s wife being pulled from a Los Angeles pool while crusty Detective Lieutenant Provenza laments both the victim’s death and his status in life. And so, even though we’d take back Johnson and Pope in a heartbeat, with the regular cast of favorites—Provenza, Flynn, Tao, Sanchez, Taylor and Buzz—staying on the case, this spin-out  police procedural continues to beat most of the crime shows out there and retains its space on our DVR.