CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 06/01/07

Investigating the Cable Procedural:
The Closer's James Duff

By jason davis

TNT tapped former playwright James Duff to create a series to air alongside the network's reruns of Law & Order and got a show that blends the tightly plotted procedural with character-centric drama in the form of The Closer.

A veteran scribe of internationally produced stage plays, James Duff moved into television with the Emmy-nominated Doing Time on Maple Drive TV movie (for which that Dead Pool actor, Jim Carrey, received rave reviews for his dramatic work) before creating the short-lived show The D.A. and later finding great success with the TNT series The Closer. The program chronicles the work of Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick), a former CIA agent who now heads up the LAPD's Priority Murder Squad, investigating high-profile homicides while wrestling with her derelict personal life and the petty bureaucracies of city government as she struggles to close each baffling case. With Johnson's team newly reformed after a brief disbandment at the end of the second season, she must reiterate the value of herself and her team while tackling even more complicated investigations. As the third season of his series prepares to kick off on June 18, CS Weekly catches up with Duff to discuss his theatrical origins, working for TNT, and the creation of The Closer.

Why did you become a writer?
I guess I'd failed at everything else. I'd always written. Even as a child, I'd wanted to be a writer, but I also wanted to be a composer, a pianist, and an actor. I did about 60 plays as an actor before I decided to try my hand at writing. I started writing children's plays at the regional theatre I worked at in Dallas. Then, when I moved to New York, I noticed that there were about—I don't know—50,000 actors for every play. The law of supply and demand sort of drove me in the direction of writing. I've always been fairly—what's the right word—opinionated, meaning that I've had a very well-developed perspective on the world. I find that useful in writing.

How did you make your first professional sale in television?
I had done a play on Broadway and in London (The War at Home). That particular play went all around the world—it was done in Sweden, Germany, Israel, Greece, Australia, and South Africa, and it won some prizes. That got me the attention of Fox Television. They wanted to do a family drama about a boy who was coming out to his family. So, after some discussion about what the story was going to be and how we were going to go about telling it, I accepted that job offer and it changed my life.

That was Doing Time on Maple Drive, for which you were nominated for an Emmy.
Yes, that's a very funny story. My parents were actually visiting me when they announced the nominations. It never occurred to me that it would be nominated. My father was fixing my vacuum cleaner in the living room, while I was in the kitchen. He said, "Hey, I think you were just nominated for an Emmy! Call your sister."

So I called her and said "I've just been nominated for an Emmy."

She said, "Oh, my gosh. Who else is nominated?"

I said, "Robert Bolt."

She said "Robert Bolt—Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons?"

And I said "Yeah…and Neil Simon—"

And she goes "Neil! Simon!"

I said "Yes…and Falsey and Brand—"

"The people who did Northern Exposure."

And I said, "Yes."

She just burst out laughing and said "Well, isn't it just fun to be nominated?"

So, that was a fairly good start to a TV career…
Yes, and I went on to do some more TV movies and I wrote a lot of pilots. I think I've written 17 or 18 pilots. We shot five of them. That's not a bad record. Two of them went to series—one of them a very limited series of four episodes (The D.A.) and The Closer. I also worked on several other television shows, and I did a feature of The War at Home with Kathy Bates, Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez (who also directed), Kimberly Williams, and Carla Gugino.

Was The Closer a spec script or did you develop it in house with TNT?
TNT liked The D.A., and they called (executive producers) Mike Robin, Greer Shephard, and I and asked if we had an idea for a companion piece for Law & Order. We came up with one on the spot and they were very clear about what they wanted in that time slot, so we tried very hard to fulfill that obligation they'd given us. The Closer is what we came up with.

What parameters did they give you to work within?
They said they wanted it to be a procedural. They wanted it to be a mystery. They wanted to hold onto the men, but not scare off the women. They wanted it to be pretty self-contained—very light serialization.

What was your initial notion for the character of Brenda Leigh Johnson?
The first idea was the Priority Murder Squad that handled high-profile murders and dealt with the messier crimes. There would be an outsider brought into the LAPD to take that job, and that character evolved into Brenda Leigh. I made her from the South because it's just not common to find someone with a Southern accent being the smartest person in the room. I was sort of tired of that. I grew up in an environment where there were many intelligent people who spoke funny—according to the rest of the country. I'd had the experience myself, when I'd gone to New York—before I'd scrubbed the Texas out of my voice—where people actually slowed down when they spoke to me because they assumed I was mentally challenged. So, I thought, let's take on that cliché and burst it apart. I wanted a character who was an actual woman—not someone who had de-sexed themselves to work in a man's world, but someone who managed as a woman in a man's world. I looked at a lot of other procedural shows and, except for Angie Harmon (who played A.D.A. Abbie Carmichael in three seasons of Law & Order), most of the women on those shows seemed like male characters in dresses, proving that they can do what a man can do. I wanted to have a woman proving that being a woman was itself an advantage sometimes in this world.

I've studied the intelligence community for a long time, so I thought it would be cool to give her a background in intelligence. There was not very much time to write this pilot and develop this show, so I based her on me, my mom, and my sister and gave her a very tight and ordered professional life and a very messy personal life. Honestly, I think most people have to perform pretty well at their jobs, and their personal life is sometimes left to order itself. I don't think it's that unfamiliar to the audience—that particular dynamic. Don't you find, honestly, when you're writing characters, that they all come from some version of you? That's how it works. Occasionally, I do base characters on other people I know. A lot of them are just different versions of myself.

You've had an eccentric array of crimes over the first two seasons—where presumed murderers are revealed to be the victims and convicted murderers are released when their victims are discovered to have died years after the criminal's incarceration—and I certainly didn't see the twist coming in your third-season premiere. Do you find it easy to come up with cases that we haven't seen on TV cop shows before?
No. It's part of our mission. We work very hard to do stories that could not have been told—or would not have been told—10 years ago. We're not recycling Murder, She Wrote and Law & Order. These are stories that could come in today's world. [The premiere's] crime basically revolves around a cell phone and a family plan. That's a fairly recent addition to the middle-class life —having everyone on a cell phone and the family connected at all times.

We have two very intense technical advisors on our show. One is Michael Berchem, a detective from Robbery-Homicide here at the LAPD. The other is Gil Garcetti, the former District Attorney for the county of Los Angeles. That's because we want to do the show as closely as we can to how real police work is done, which is why we don't have lasers and strange machines to show you how someone was thrown off a balcony. We take a bunch of dummies and hurl them off—different weights and sizes—because that's what they actually do. They don't have elaborate methods of reconstructing the crime. DNA takes time to come back. Ballistics are often done with metal rods instead of drawings. We do have a PowerPoint presentation that we use now and then, but it's pathetic. That's what they have. I asked Michael Berchem how many cases he had broken with DNA and he said one. He said DNA is great once you have the guy or the woman, but it doesn't really help you get there very often. Most of the time, it's a way of convicting the person, not finding them in the first place.

Could you describe how you break stories on The Closer
We pick a theme to carry us through the season and we do permutations on that theme. This year, we've done family as a theme. How do you keep a family together? What are the challenges in keeping a family together? What problems do families face that they have to overcome? Then we start throwing out ideas the first few days we're together—crimes that might lend themselves to that. Then we pick a crime and a theme to go with it and we just relentlessly hang to both of them. In terms of building an episode, I'm a big fan of structure. We go through it beat by beat and we write very long—25- to 30-page—outlines. Then, we translate those into script documents and go over them in minute detail to make sure the theme is clear and moving through the whole episode and that the character's journey is significant. Those are all big asks and we don't always make it. We don't always achieve brilliance, but we're always trying to. We have a lot of respect for our audience in terms of whether or not they catch the theme. They will sense the theme -- it will register on their unconscious. We feel like it helps us not only tie the show together, but tie them to us.

Though it's not really a B-plot, per se, there are running themes of inter-agency politics and government bureaucracy that add humor to the scripts while providing hurdles for Brenda. How do you go about making day-to-day tedium into a compelling dramatic ingredient?
All of us have to deal with office politics. All of us have to deal with how we're going to manage to do our jobs and follow the rules, when often doing our jobs properly means breaking the rules. Then you have a legal system to satisfy on top of that and a life at stake—a murder—it's life and death and the bureaucracy that goes with it. You'd think the bureaucracy would just move aside in investigating a crime, and just the opposite happens.

As a basic cable show, do you have wider latitudes with Standards and Practices?
Standards and Practices is still an issue, and our desire for authenticity often leads us to a question of how far we can go. I have to say that there's a limit to how much of that I want to see Monday night at nine o'clock after my first day back in the work week. One of the big things about The Closer, and I consider it a major point, is that we do not want to glorify violence. We want to show the consequences of it. We've only actually seen one person shot in the entire time we've been on the air—in our season finale last year. Otherwise, you're seeing the consequences of violent crime, which is what the police see anyway.

How does working for TNT differ from working in network television?
I don't know what it's like to work with network television anymore because I haven't done it in so long. Most of the people who were in charge of network entertainment—except for (CBS President and CEO) Leslie Moonves, who is probably sharper than your average knife—are all gone, so I don't know what it's like to do a network series anymore.

I can tell you that on basic cable they treat you as a partner, and TNT is an amazing place to work. They respect the writers and the producers. Not that they don't have a point of view, they have a very strong point of view, but it's always put to you in a rational way. You're always involved in the decision-making process and it's done the way it's supposed to be.

Film is a collaborative medium. Whether it's broadcast on a box in your living room or on a big screen in a multiplex, it takes a lot of different shoulders to carry that particular burden from its creation to its completion and TNT recognizes that. In my previous experience, the networks did not. It was basically, "You're going to do this our way and you're going to thank us." That's not been my experience at TNT, and I'm very grateful to them for that.

Jason Davis is the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

James Duff, The Closer courtesy TNT

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