Season 7, Episode 17: Fool's Gold - July 16, 2012

2006 began the second season of The Closer, I had hired a mostly new crew and signaled a move to a new office. What began as a dark dank concrete slab of a workspace became what we referred to as The Loft, even though we were on the ground floor the space resembled a fabulous New York loft. We painted the walls gallery white, laid industrial grey carpet on the concrete floor and I splashed calligraphy all over the walls in black ink defining the word "style". I loved the loft, it made my work oh so creative or was it the character of Brenda Leigh Johnson and the creator James Duff? Brenda had now been in L.A. for a year and my marching orders from Duff were to have her assimilate into LA Fashion -- Brenda style!?! Gone were the ill-fitting polyester blazers and oversized suits. Enter vintage jackets and cashmere not rayon sweater sets. I discovered a wonderful resource for Kyra's cashmere twin sets, a mail order catalog out of England, Pure Collection. They offered sweaters and shells in every color imaginable, to the hip cardigans, cropped sweaters, v-necks, scoops and round necks. It was such fun to mix and match the new sweaters with Brenda's now signature floral flirty skirts, add a shell under a suit jacket or put together two shades of a certain color to still keep Brenda a little quirky.

Season 2 was also the year that the color story began to play such an important part in the overall look of The Closer, starting with the costume concept meeting that we have every time a new script comes out, to the actual design and pulling of the episodes costumes. This season 2 I had a costume supervisor that wanted to be creative and not just sit behind a desk and crunch numbers, so I let him take over the task of pulling together the looks of all the detectives. I would set the tone with whatever I wanted Brenda to wear for the episode, for instance a pink floral skirt and a pink twin set, then he would work the colors of each detective around that, for instance if Gabriel was supporting Brenda he would have some bits of pink in his tie or shirt, and Flynn, Brenda's thorn in her side for a few episodes would then have the opposite color combinations on. The color wheel became our best friend and it was fun to subtly play with color in a dramatic and story telling way.

The famed Closer Friday night parties continued, the Costume department hosted the first which was a "Redneck Party" with most of the crew dressing in their best PWT looks, tube tops and butt crack jeans...and that was Kyra! No just joking with that one. We also started hosting the annual contests, we had each crew member bring a baby picture, posted them on the back stage wall and had the crew guess who each photo was, prizes were given and the bonding of an already tight crew began again for the second season of Cable’s highest rated show ever.

The season came to a very fast end and I wondered where oh where I would let Brenda venture in her fashion exploration. By the end of the 6 months we were ready for a break and the unknown. This would be the first time in my career that I knew I had a show coming back for a third season. Producer Andy Sacks and myself had never had a show last past a second season. The curse was broken and we had no idea that The Closer would become the phenomena that it would.