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Major Crimes: A Primer
I have noticed a startling lack of people here who watch a certain series, so I thought an introduction was in order.
Let me tell you about Major Crimes, your favourite new summer show!
(Disclaimer: All gifs are shamelessly stolen from tumblr, but if you hover over them, the credit should show up.)
Major Crimes started out as the spin-off of The Closer, which was on the air for seven years, but it has definitely become a show of its own in the past year. In fact, you don’t even need to have seen The Closer to understand what Major Crimes is about, especially once you’ve read through this post. (I’m not just saying that; I watched all of one episode of TC before I started MC, and still haven’t seen many episodes.) I’ll introduce you to the characters, most of which were taken over from The Closer, and tell you the two or three plot points from The Closer that will make it easier to understand the beginning of Major Crimes.
THE SHOW
Major Crimes is, as the title suggests, a procedural. It’s set in the LAPD division of the same name, and the team deal with the worst of the worst, basically. The crimes they solve are mostly murder cases, although we do have the occasional serial killer and kidnapper thrown in. But that’s not what the show is about, not really. The cases are interesting, please don’t get me wrong, but they’re not the central part of the show. Instead, the characters and their relationships are.
THE CLOSER
In this show, we hear about more than just the Major Crimes Division. We also hear, at least in passing, about Robbery/Homicide, Traffic, and Force Investigation Division, among others. The latter is the most important division where this post is concerned. Our leading lady on Major Crimes, Sharon Raydor, worked in FID during The Closer. At that time, Major Crimes Division was led by Chief Johnson. FID (also known as Internal Affairs) isn’t liked by anyone in the LAPD because they’re called in whenever an LAPD officer shoots a suspect or technically commits any other crime. That’s why most of the LAPD thinks of Internal Affairs as outsiders who are only there to question their actions. So when Sharon Raydor comes in to investigate various members of the Major Crimes Division in season five of The Closer, everyone hates her. (Don’t get me started on that, we could be here all night. She’s just doing her job, dear god. Anyway.) Chief Johnson doesn’t really care much about rules, as long as she gets criminals convicted / punished. This becomes important towards the end of The Closer, when, after a long FID investigation and even a trial, she eventually quits. Another long-running plotline on The Closer is that of Philip Stroh, a lawyer slash serial rapist and killer, who manages to evade capture again and again. In the finale, though, he is caught burying one of his victims by Rusty Beck, a fifteen-year-old who lives on the street after his mother abandoned him and who survives solely by selling himself to older men. During one of his ‘dates’, Rusty witnesses Stroh burying a woman and ends up becoming the key witness against him. Those are the main two points you need to be aware of when starting Major Crimes. The lovely![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
quarantedeux made a list of essential The Closer episodes, so do check that out, it's very helpful!
THE CHARACTERS
Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell)
Sharon, as mentioned above, used to work in FID and investigated several members of the Major Crimes Division in her career, particularly Chief Johnson and Lieutenant Flynn. In the Major Crimes pilot, however, she is transferred from Internal Affairs to replace Chief Johnson as the head of Major Crimes Division. Obviously, that causes a lot of friction within the division, no matter how good an officer Sharon is. She has to prove herself a lot early on, but as time passes, she is accepted more and more as one of the team. Personally, Sharon is married with two grown children, but since she’s been legally separated from her husband for two decades, she lives alone.
Lieutenant Louie Provenza (G.W. Bailey)
Provenza is like the grumpy grandfather of the division. He pretends not to care about anyone or anything, but really he loves his team a lot. He has about a million children from his four or so marriages, and his best friend is Andy Flynn. When Sharon comes in as new head of Major Crimes, Provenza is Not Amused because he thought, as the senior member of the team, he would be taking over the division. That’s why it takes him the longest to warm up to Sharon.
Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison)
Andy is the resident hothead of the division. He’s constantly getting into trouble (especially with FID, where he has a bigger file than most other officers) and manages to antagonise quite a few people. But underneath that, he’s a great officer and a great person. He was married once and has at least one child, but he started drinking, which probably led to the ruin of his marriage. He’s been sober for about fifteen years at the start of the show, though, and still attends AA meetings on a regular basis. While he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind when he thinks she’s making a mistake, Andy is also the first one from the old team to support Sharon in front of the others.(cough. cough cough.)
Lieutenant Mike Tao (Michael Paul Chan)
Tao is the tech guy. He knows a lot about science in general and computers in particular, and often deals with that side of the investigation. He’s married with a teenage son.
Detective Julio Sanchez (Raymond Cruz)
Expert on Latino gangs. Hobbies: Yelling at suspects, looking generally threatening towards bad guys, flirting with Deputy District Attorneys.
Detective Amy Sykes (Kearran Giovanni)
We don’t actually know much about Sykes yet. She is the only one who was completely new to the ‘verse when Major Crimes started. She was consulted on the first case the new Major Crimes team ever worked and ended up transferring into the unit before the end of the pilot episode. She was in the Army and served in Afghanistan, and knows her way around surveillance very well. She’s also a bit of a suck-up early on, trying desperately to get everyone to like her, which is often met with annoyance from her team mates.
Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene)
Buzz is the second tech guy, a civilian consultant who is often found taking videos of the crime scenes as well as monitoring and recording suspect interrogations. He also becomes a bit of a big brother to Rusty fairly early on.
Rusty Beck (Graham Patrick Martin)
As mentioned above, Rusty is a fifteen-year-old who has to sell himself on the street to survive after his mother and her boyfriend abandoned him at a zoo. He is the key witness to a series of murders and as such has to be protected. With no one to take care of him, and his tendency to run away from foster families, it becomes a bit of a challenge to keep him around long enough for him to actually testify. As the show progresses, we see him starting to struggle with his identity. /mysterious
There are a couple of minor / recurring characters, but those up there are really the important ones. And I think I even managed not to give away too much that happens!
THE CASES
Let’s go back to the cases for a second. While I stand by what I said earlier—that the cases don’t really matter in the big picture—, I love how respectfully everything on this show is dealt with. It’s not just about finding the killer, it’s also about how that killer gets put away, how justice is actually served, more or less. And one of the main themes of the show seems to be parent/child (or similar) relationships, both as part of the cases and personally for the main characters. I generally don’t like plots evolving around (bad things done to) children, but I have to admit that this show does them so well that it never feels cheap or just for the ~shock factor, if you will. Everything just works. I’ve seen a lot of procedurals in my time and this one is easily the best, or at least among them.
THE FACTS
Season one has ten episodes. Season two just went on hiatus last week after eleven episodes, and will be back on Nov 25th for another eight. So if you start now, you can totally catch up by then; it’s only twenty-one episodes! And, best of all, the show has already been renewed for a third season, so there won’t be any nasty cliffhangers or anything.
Now that you know everything you need to, go watch this show! You know you want to! Could you really say no to this face?
REALLY?
WHAT ABOUT THOSE LEGS THEN? OR THAT HAIR?
OR… AHEM… THIS SHIRT?
…why are you still here?
Let me tell you about Major Crimes, your favourite new summer show!
(Disclaimer: All gifs are shamelessly stolen from tumblr, but if you hover over them, the credit should show up.)
Major Crimes started out as the spin-off of The Closer, which was on the air for seven years, but it has definitely become a show of its own in the past year. In fact, you don’t even need to have seen The Closer to understand what Major Crimes is about, especially once you’ve read through this post. (I’m not just saying that; I watched all of one episode of TC before I started MC, and still haven’t seen many episodes.) I’ll introduce you to the characters, most of which were taken over from The Closer, and tell you the two or three plot points from The Closer that will make it easier to understand the beginning of Major Crimes.
THE SHOW
Major Crimes is, as the title suggests, a procedural. It’s set in the LAPD division of the same name, and the team deal with the worst of the worst, basically. The crimes they solve are mostly murder cases, although we do have the occasional serial killer and kidnapper thrown in. But that’s not what the show is about, not really. The cases are interesting, please don’t get me wrong, but they’re not the central part of the show. Instead, the characters and their relationships are.
THE CLOSER
In this show, we hear about more than just the Major Crimes Division. We also hear, at least in passing, about Robbery/Homicide, Traffic, and Force Investigation Division, among others. The latter is the most important division where this post is concerned. Our leading lady on Major Crimes, Sharon Raydor, worked in FID during The Closer. At that time, Major Crimes Division was led by Chief Johnson. FID (also known as Internal Affairs) isn’t liked by anyone in the LAPD because they’re called in whenever an LAPD officer shoots a suspect or technically commits any other crime. That’s why most of the LAPD thinks of Internal Affairs as outsiders who are only there to question their actions. So when Sharon Raydor comes in to investigate various members of the Major Crimes Division in season five of The Closer, everyone hates her. (Don’t get me started on that, we could be here all night. She’s just doing her job, dear god. Anyway.) Chief Johnson doesn’t really care much about rules, as long as she gets criminals convicted / punished. This becomes important towards the end of The Closer, when, after a long FID investigation and even a trial, she eventually quits. Another long-running plotline on The Closer is that of Philip Stroh, a lawyer slash serial rapist and killer, who manages to evade capture again and again. In the finale, though, he is caught burying one of his victims by Rusty Beck, a fifteen-year-old who lives on the street after his mother abandoned him and who survives solely by selling himself to older men. During one of his ‘dates’, Rusty witnesses Stroh burying a woman and ends up becoming the key witness against him. Those are the main two points you need to be aware of when starting Major Crimes. The lovely
THE CHARACTERS
Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell)
Sharon, as mentioned above, used to work in FID and investigated several members of the Major Crimes Division in her career, particularly Chief Johnson and Lieutenant Flynn. In the Major Crimes pilot, however, she is transferred from Internal Affairs to replace Chief Johnson as the head of Major Crimes Division. Obviously, that causes a lot of friction within the division, no matter how good an officer Sharon is. She has to prove herself a lot early on, but as time passes, she is accepted more and more as one of the team. Personally, Sharon is married with two grown children, but since she’s been legally separated from her husband for two decades, she lives alone.
Lieutenant Louie Provenza (G.W. Bailey)
Provenza is like the grumpy grandfather of the division. He pretends not to care about anyone or anything, but really he loves his team a lot. He has about a million children from his four or so marriages, and his best friend is Andy Flynn. When Sharon comes in as new head of Major Crimes, Provenza is Not Amused because he thought, as the senior member of the team, he would be taking over the division. That’s why it takes him the longest to warm up to Sharon.
Lieutenant Andy Flynn (Tony Denison)
Andy is the resident hothead of the division. He’s constantly getting into trouble (especially with FID, where he has a bigger file than most other officers) and manages to antagonise quite a few people. But underneath that, he’s a great officer and a great person. He was married once and has at least one child, but he started drinking, which probably led to the ruin of his marriage. He’s been sober for about fifteen years at the start of the show, though, and still attends AA meetings on a regular basis. While he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind when he thinks she’s making a mistake, Andy is also the first one from the old team to support Sharon in front of the others.
Lieutenant Mike Tao (Michael Paul Chan)
Tao is the tech guy. He knows a lot about science in general and computers in particular, and often deals with that side of the investigation. He’s married with a teenage son.
Detective Julio Sanchez (Raymond Cruz)
Expert on Latino gangs. Hobbies: Yelling at suspects, looking generally threatening towards bad guys, flirting with Deputy District Attorneys.
Detective Amy Sykes (Kearran Giovanni)
We don’t actually know much about Sykes yet. She is the only one who was completely new to the ‘verse when Major Crimes started. She was consulted on the first case the new Major Crimes team ever worked and ended up transferring into the unit before the end of the pilot episode. She was in the Army and served in Afghanistan, and knows her way around surveillance very well. She’s also a bit of a suck-up early on, trying desperately to get everyone to like her, which is often met with annoyance from her team mates.
Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene)
Buzz is the second tech guy, a civilian consultant who is often found taking videos of the crime scenes as well as monitoring and recording suspect interrogations. He also becomes a bit of a big brother to Rusty fairly early on.
Rusty Beck (Graham Patrick Martin)
As mentioned above, Rusty is a fifteen-year-old who has to sell himself on the street to survive after his mother and her boyfriend abandoned him at a zoo. He is the key witness to a series of murders and as such has to be protected. With no one to take care of him, and his tendency to run away from foster families, it becomes a bit of a challenge to keep him around long enough for him to actually testify. As the show progresses, we see him starting to struggle with his identity. /mysterious
There are a couple of minor / recurring characters, but those up there are really the important ones. And I think I even managed not to give away too much that happens!
THE CASES
Let’s go back to the cases for a second. While I stand by what I said earlier—that the cases don’t really matter in the big picture—, I love how respectfully everything on this show is dealt with. It’s not just about finding the killer, it’s also about how that killer gets put away, how justice is actually served, more or less. And one of the main themes of the show seems to be parent/child (or similar) relationships, both as part of the cases and personally for the main characters. I generally don’t like plots evolving around (bad things done to) children, but I have to admit that this show does them so well that it never feels cheap or just for the ~shock factor, if you will. Everything just works. I’ve seen a lot of procedurals in my time and this one is easily the best, or at least among them.
THE FACTS
Season one has ten episodes. Season two just went on hiatus last week after eleven episodes, and will be back on Nov 25th for another eight. So if you start now, you can totally catch up by then; it’s only twenty-one episodes! And, best of all, the show has already been renewed for a third season, so there won’t be any nasty cliffhangers or anything.
Now that you know everything you need to, go watch this show! You know you want to! Could you really say no to this face?
REALLY?
WHAT ABOUT THOSE LEGS THEN? OR THAT HAIR?
OR… AHEM… THIS SHIRT?
…why are you still here?
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Actually, I've had my eye on this show but it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere atm. Netflix does have DVDs though.
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I wish I could've included links or something. :/ But if you can get the DVDs, go for it! You'll only be needing a weekend or so if you can make enough time.
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:DDDDDDDD EXCELLENT CHOICE. Lemme know what you think!
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it makes me cry
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Thanks for the info. I will have to give this a try. She's just too mesmerizing!
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Yay, I hope you enjoy! No one can resist Mary McD. ;)
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