Courtesy TNT
Courtesy TNT
Courtesy TNT
Courtesy TNT
Courtesy TNT
Fill 1
Fill 1
February 12, 2016
Online Originals

Serial Killer

James Duff, creator, executive producer, and writer of TNT’s hit Major Crimes, looks forward to escaping the realm of the procedural in a new five-­part series arc.

Brooke Carlock Miller

On the day that James Duff and his team at Major Crimes finished breaking their 18th episode in season four, he got a call from TNT asking if he could add an additional five episodes to the season.

"Personally, I felt both elated by the order, and devastated by the concept of the work that would have to go behind it," he muses from the back of a limo on his way to the airport.

Up to that point, each season had been based on a centralized theme around which Duff and his writers focused the season's stories. "The theme is usually a word or phrase... last season was "courage," and then we segued into "trust" for the fall," says Duff.

"But when the call came, after we had exhausted our theme, the idea of coming up with five new stories was very..." he trails off, trying to wrap his head around the mixed emotions he felt at the time.

"I had been carrying this idea for a pilot in the back of my head. But procedurals aren't selling well right now. Even though the audiences are still showing up for procedurals in a big way, networks are not as interested in doing them. So I took this idea that I had for a 10­-episode procedural with different characters and I thought... 'What if we did it with our characters?'"

Duff decided to rework his original idea of a 10­-episode procedural into a five­-part serialized storyline­­ using the characters from Major Crimes. Banking on the current success of serialized television, he pitched his pilot story to the network and was given the green light to create the first serialized episodes in Major Crimes history.

When he and his team got to work on the new episodes, "It became a feature of exhaustion and trend meeting in a very unusual writers' room, and we embraced the challenge," Duff says. "I loved that we were able to pick up a creative challenge of this size after running for this long. To us, it was exciting. It offered the chance to do some interesting character work that we'd not been able to do before."

To say that the well­-oiled team at Major Crimes has been running a long time is an understatement.

The series premiered in 2012 as a spin­off to Duff's juggernaut The Closer, which starred Kyra Sedgwick as an unconventional, southern, and sassy LAPD Deputy Chief.

The spinoff series follows LAPD Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) and a close-­knit ensemble of LAPD detectives including G.W. Bailey as Lt. Provenza, Tony Denison as Lt. Flynn, Raymond Cruz as Det. Sanchez, Michael Paul Chan as Det. Tao, Kearran Giovanni as Det. Sykes, and Phillip P. Keene as Reserve Officer Buzz Watson, along with series regulars Graham Patrick Martin as Sharon's adopted son Rusty Beck, Robert Gossett as Asst. Chief Russell Taylor, and Jonathan Del Arco as Dr. Morales.

The Closer ran for seven years (2005­-2012), and nearly all of the characters remained with Duff and made the leap to Major Crimes after The Closer's finale.  As Duff notes, "We don't have very much turnover.

"We've been working together now for a very long time, and it's a family. Well, it's like a family and it's not like a family, because we don't argue, really... Everybody works all week together, and on Friday night the cast and crew, if there's no night shooting, they'll have a little party on the patio out by Stage 5.

"You would think that after spending 12 years together and 60 hours together during the week, they'd love nothing better than to say 'See you on Monday,' but they don't do that. It's a very healthy, happy dynamic."

The camaraderie of the ensemble on Major Crimes allows Duff and his team to dive deeper into the characters who were not fully explored on The Closer.

"It's an ensemble show. The Closer was very, very relentlessly about Brenda (Sedgwick) and her point of view. Major Crimes is more fractured. You see the story from several sides, and the more you know about the individual characters, the more that point of view means to you."

Having a longstanding relationship with the actors on his shows also allows Duff to plan and write episodes with his actors in mind. One character for whom Duff particularly enjoys writing is Lt. Louie Provenza, played by G.W. Bailey.

"It's one of the great pleasures of my life," gushes Duff, "especially when you consider my relationship with G.W. I met him when I was 15 years old, and he was my acting teacher in a high school workshop... so I've known him for 45 years. That gives you an edge when you're writing for a character, or writing for an actor. 

"He's very comfortable coming up to me and saying, 'I think I should say this,' or 'What about this?'. We bounce stuff off of each other. He has so many great moments.

"We are making a conscious effort to bring more of [the ensemble's] personal lives to the fore. It's interesting watching police officers try to deal with their jobs and their personal lives at the same time. We try to depict detectives as they really are, and that's one of the reasons why our show has been honored so many times by the law enforcement community."

In fact, the realism of the show is one reason that fans sometimes find themselves both moved and shocked by Major Crimes.  Many viewers find themselves wondering, "Can the police really do that?"

Duff's answer is, simply, "Yes, they can."

"If you look at our detectives, they lie constantly. They are shifty, they are remorseless a lot of the times. The police really can lie to you. There are some things they can't do, but it's not against the law for the police to lie to you." He laughs, "Which is great. They're going after murderers, and murderers lie all the time, so I don't think you'd want [the police] to stop."

Duff prides himself on the authenticity of not only the characters, but the situations in which the characters find themselves.

Just a few of the topics the show has already dealt with in detail include divorce, anger management, health scares, homosexuality, prostitution, adoption, and stalking. When asked about the challenges of balancing the "edginess" of the show with the fan base's desire for clean, well­-written, intelligent programming, Duff brushes the idea of "edge" aside.

"Is it a difficult balance? No. I kill someone every week. In episode seven last year, there was a dead baby wrapped up in a box in a refrigerator.  In episode 18 a guy went around filming his murders live. We have to watch our language, and we have to watch nudity, but I try to live in an authentic universe.

"If someone turns up missing on our show, if there's a kidnapped girl, there's a very good chance she's dead. In fact, we've only found two missing people in the whole history of the show, and that's a bad record in some ways, but it's an authentic record.

"I've not done one thing to 'edge up' a story, and it says something that in the very top of the fourth act there is a kiss between two guys, with one under 21 years old. I guarantee you, in a large part of the world, that is still considered 'edgy.'  Only in Hollywood..." Duff trails off.

So, should viewers expect the same authenticity with the new five­-part series?

According to Duff, viewers are in for a treat. While Major Crimes has previously followed a few long­running storylines that appeared in several episodes, "the major difference between these episodes and the other episodes is the depth of field. We're just able to do a much bigger form of storytelling with much larger character moves than we normally have time to do.

"This was an awesome chance to tell a twisty, turny mystery while also revealing character traits that I think people will enjoy knowing about our major characters."

The five­-part series, titled "Hindsight," begins with a young black mother and her three year old son who are found dead in a red SUV in a notoriously gang-­infested area of Los Angeles. To complicate matters, heroin is under the child's car seat. Confusing things even further, the team links the weapon used in the killings to a notorious case of unsolved homicides involving the LAPD.

The story arc tackles some tough questions and current issues, most notably the rise in heroin use, gang violence and minority distrust of the police. Duff doesn't shy away from the subjects, instead choosing to face them head­on.

"Heroin has become an epidemic in our country... it's become a huge issue, and we wanted to show that. When we started writing about it, it just kept showing up in places we didn't even know it existed as a problem."

Duff feels especially strongly about the race issues explored in the upcoming episodes, having lived through the civil rights movement. As a child growing up in Texas, and with relatives in Mississippi, he remembers watching a freedom march and being on a bus where black passengers were forced to stand.

"I'm not offering any kind of solution to racism," he asserts, "I'm just being upfront about it, because racism did not end with the election of President Obama, and we do not live in a post­racial country. As ideal as that would be, that's not where we are. It's still a primitive issue that we have not been able to eliminate from our civilization.

"So, I thought this would be a good place to dramatize it. I'm only asking questions, really... I'm not really answering them. I'm asking people to think about race as the story goes forward.  Just to consider it."

With the difficult work behind him, how does Duff feel now that the additional five episodes are complete?

"I think we got it right," Duff reflects, "I feel like we're moving in the right direction." Duff and his fellow producers, including Michael Robin and Greer Shephard, who have been with him since The Closer, plan to continue in a procedural format with a new theme for season five.

"This coming season is going to be all about balance,­­ how we try to find balance in our lives­­ the balance between pragmatism and idealism, the balance between family and work, the balance between what we dream we can do and what we can actually achieve.

"Balance is something that we hunt for in our daily lives, and never completely find, I think. It's one of those things that we're always searching for and trying to achieve but can't perfect."

When asked if serialized stories will find their way into the balance of the new season, Duff responds, "We're going to be more serialized than we used to be, but I think the themes help us hold on to the different stories and connect them.

"If you think of it as a sonata, for example, or a concerto or a symphony... there are different movements but the movements are all connected by a theme. The movement inside the piece can be faster, or the tempo can change, or the main thrust of the movement is maybe counter to the first movement, but it's still complimentary. Major Crimes is like that."

Whether the format changes or remains the same, one thing is for sure­­ the five­-part series is sure to be killer.

The Major Crimes winter five-­part series premieres Monday, February 15th at 9/8c on TNT.

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