Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Closer: 1998 Winter Preview TV Guide

The Closer aired from February until May 1998 on CBS.

Jack ( Tom Selleck), was a slick, self-centered Denver advertising executive who had been fired from his previous job after beating the President at golf and losing the Agency's biggest client, the U.S. Army. Instead of taking a job at another Agency, Jack started his own, in a run-down factory building, so he could provide work for the support team that had been let go with him.They were Carl ( Edward Asner), the crusty sarcastic creative director; Bruno ( David Krumholtz), a boyish young copywriter with few strong convictions about anything; Suzy ( Beverly Andolini), Jack's sexy and efficiant secretary; and Erica ( Penelope Ann Miller), an easily flustered Ivy League accountant who wanted to do something more exciting then spreadsheets. Also seen regularly was Jack's daughter Alex( Heddy Buress), an independent young woman immune to any of his slick lines. Jack and her mother Claire ( Joanna Kerns), were in the final stages of divorce. The series title refered to Jack's legendary reputation for always being able to close a deal.

There had been press rumors of creative problems with The Closer even before it got on the air, and things apparently didn't inprove. Co-Star Penelope Ann Miller, unhappy with the development of her role, jumpted ship after taping only 4 episodes, and 5 episodes later the show had it's last airing.

A Review from Variety

The Closer
(Mon. (23), 9-9:30 p.m., CBS)
By RAY RICHMOND

Filmed in Burbank by TWS II Prods and Frontier Pictures in association with CBS Prods. and Warner Bros. TV. Executive producers, Ed Decter, John J. Strauss, Tom Selleck; producer, Craig Wyrick-Solari; director, Andrew D. Weyman; writers, Decter, Strauss.

Cast: Tom Selleck, Ed Asner, Penelope Ann Miller, David Krumholtz, Hedy Burress, Suzy Nakamura, Joanna Kerns, Barry Corbin, Michael McKean, Clyde Kusatsu.

A decade after Thomas Magnum's retirement, Tom Selleck rolls back onto the CBS schedule with a character-driven midseason sitcom about a man having a midlife crisis and the people who are only too pleased to help him have it. For Selleck, there's no real pressure. All he has to do is single-handedly resuscitate CBS' sluggish Monday night slate. Based on a fairly promising pilot, the guy who once battled "The Cosby Show" on competitive terms might just pull it off.
Surely, "The Closer" has a lot going for it going in: a lively cast (Selleck, Ed Asner, Penelope Ann Miller), snappy dialogue, "Murphy Brown's" old timeslot and the good sense not to push the one-liners too hard. That's fortunate, because the opener isn't all that funny. But the show feels like it will one day be funny. And Selleck looks as if he's having a really good time.

Energetic kickoff seg, penned by creators Ed Decter and John J. Strauss, introduces us to Jack McLaren (Selleck), a Denver adman who's so legendary for his ability to close deals that he's literally called "The Legend." His credo: "Never let the client see you're human."

This is how huge Jack is: he gets to play golf with the president. But it does Jack's career no good when he beats the president's pants off (so to speak) on the course, considering that the U.S. Army just happens to be his agency's biggest client. Within hours, he and his entire creative team are history. And it all happens at pretty much the same time that his wife (guest Joanna Kerns) is serving him with divorce papers.

Some legend.

But in typically contrived sitcom fashion, Jack barely blinks before rejecting a huge offer from a competitor and launching his own ad agency along with his motley cohorts: crusty creative director Carl Dobson (Asner), nerd deluxe copywriter Bruno (David Krumholtz), eternally wisecracking secretary Beverly (Suzy Nakamura) and wiggy accountant Erica (Miller).

The supporting players are standard-issue and harmless enough. The only true standout in the pilot is Miller, whose character's flighty ways play against stereotype in that she's an Ivy League grad (a nice touch).

Episode strikes a pothole about halfway in when Jack gets hit with an emotional sock to the solar plexus and has something resembling a bonding moment with his feisty daughter Alex (solidly played by Hedy Burress), who wants to forsake college for a snowboarding career. But Barry Corbin's cornpone turn during the final scenes rides in to save the day, bringing the show a quirky energy it earlier lacks.

In short, "The Closer" ain't quite there yet, but has obvious potential. Selleck is self-deprecatingly smooth if a bit mechanical in his return to the series grind, perhaps showing the rust of 10 years away from primetime's paces. But he will no doubt hit his stride quickly enough. His show just might, too, if it can resist the temptation to substitute wackiness for believability.

In six weeks, we'll know a lot more. The smart money says not to bet against Selleck -- even when he's not wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

A Review From The New York Times

TELEVISION REVIEW; Loses Job, Starts Company And Looks Like Tom Selleck

By CARYN JAMES
Published: February 23, 1998

All those vague CBS promos for Tom Selleck's new sitcom turn out to be smarter than they seemed. They promised a Selleck comedy, without hinting what the show was about. Sure enough, the premise of ''The Closer'' is as mundane as they come, but this generic workplace comedy is redeemed by Mr. Selleck at his sly, charming best.

In a role tailor-made for his appeal, he plays Jack McLaren, a Denver advertising executive known as the Closer. Like that other Selleck hero, Thomas Magnum, McLaren comes with a good heart and a mischievous glint in his eye. He is funny in a slightly self-deprecating way. And he looks like Tom Selleck without being cocky about it.

In the first episode, McLaren, famous in the advertising industry for his cold-blooded business deals and manipulation, wins a golf match with the President. (This happens off camera; no messy Clinton caricatures here.) He then loses the United States Army advertising account and his job. That's where ''The Closer'' starts cranking out cliches, as McLaren starts his own company in a ramshackle former factory.

Downwardly mobile heroes have been stock figures in some dreadful recent sitcoms (''Fired Up'' and Tom Arnold's ''Tom Show''). ''The Closer'' improves on those, but the players surrounding Mr. Selleck are wildly uneven. Two are fine, delivering droll lines: Ed Asner as the creative director and Suzy Nakamura as the smart-mouthed office manager. Two are so whiny they are annoying: Penelope Ann Miller as an accountant and David Krumholtz as a copywriter. Two are simply predictable: Joanna Kerns as McLaren's wife, who is divorcing him, and Hedy Burress as their strong-minded college-age daughter, who moves in with him and keeps him honest.

By the end of the half-hour, McLaren discovers his emotional side, though Mr. Selleck's shrewd performance insists on a glimmer of doubt. Will the show's writing rise to the level of Mr. Selleck's appealing performance? So far, there are scenes like this. The copywriter says of Jack: ''This enormous and handsome man is the closer. Why? Because he knows how to go out there, win accounts and keep each and every client happy.'' At that moment the elevator door opens to reveal a client who says, ''Jack, I am very unhappy.'' That's discouraging, but Mr. Selleck gives some reason for hope.

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
Doubting Tom S.
The former Magnum, P.I., cashes in on his Friends stint with CBS' clueless Closer
--

By Ken Tucker

It's a comedy rule of thumb: If you buy the premise, you'll buy the joke. That old saw is particularly appropriate for The Closer (CBS, Mondays, 9-9:30 p.m.), the new Tom Selleck sitcom about a guy who wants you to buy things. In case you haven't watched it -- and judging from its not-gangbusters ratings, you may not have -- Selleck plays Jack McLaren, a fired ad exec who starts his own company. Jack is legendary for being a ''closer'' -- i.e., someone who'll do anything to close a deal, and as we learned from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, closers are ruthless, soulless people.

Selleck, I am afraid, is the closer as huggy bear; not for a second do you believe this warm, smiley, jovial fellow would do anything unethical to achieve material goals. We are told that Jack used to be like that, but it cost him his marriage and prevented him from spending much time with his now college-age daughter, played by the terrifically lively, wry Hedy Burress (Boston Common). These days, Jack wants to be a closer with morals, an awfully dull premise for what clearly wants to be a snappy sitcom.

And therefore, we don't buy it, not even with Edward Asner on hand to be more energetically grumpy-funny than he's been since The Mary Tyler Moore Show (boy, must he be glad his embarrassing Fox 'com, Ask Harriet, was canceled so fast!). Nor do we buy Penelope Ann Miller, descending from feature films to play a dithering accountant with a plucky airiness that all too quickly becomes a bad, probably inadvertent imitation of Shelley Long. Selleck is a first-rate TV star, as likable as they come. Alas, in The Closer, he's just a big lug. C-

A Review From TeeVee.org

Send This Closer to the Showers
by Gregg Wrenn — February 27, 1998

First of all, before legions of Tom Selleck fans crawl out of the woodwork and drown out the venomous screams of Tim Curry cultists with bloodcurdling missives of their own, let's get one thing straight:
I think Tom Selleck is just dandy.

Honestly, and without even the most subtle trace of sarcasm, I can tell you that he is one of my all-time favorite Hollywood people. Magnum, P.I. is one of the strongest links in the chain of Tropical Cops shows that extends from Hawaii Five-O through Magnum to Miami Vice and Acapulco H.E.A.T. Granted, I don't know the man personally, but he is a frequent guest on Letterman, and that kind of approval is good enough for me. I even liked "Quigley Down Under."

But Selleck's career since the loathsome "Three Men and a Baby" and all of that film's ill-begotten spawn hasn't exactly been on fire. Sure, there's "Mr. Baseball," not to mention his role in "Her Alibi" opposite supermodel extraordinaire and Ric Ocasek main squeeze Paulina. He even did yeoman's work in a TNT cable movie a couple years back.

But it wasn't until his extended guest shot on Friends that he was catapulted back into the front burner of America's TV stove.

Capitalizing on his recurring role as the older man in Courteney Cox's life and his widely-praised portrayal of a gay reporter in the Kevin Kline film "In and Out," Selleck put the word on the street: I want more comedy. Supposedly, he was finicky about the projects pitched to him, turning down several high-profile offers before settling on The Closer.

Evidently Selleck simply got tired of looking past the dump truck of money CBS president Les Moonves parked in his driveway, because "settling" is what Selleck has done. The Closer is so tediously mediocre, it makes the incessantly-irritating Friends seem like a breath of fresh air. It's remarkable that someone with as much apparent intelligence and clout as Selleck ended up getting roped into a half-hour that could only be enjoyed by the same people that find America's Funniest Home Videos (or as we're now supposed to think of it, AFV) deliciously spicy and original.

That said, it's important to note that Tom Selleck is not The Closer's problem. Selleck is a terrific comedy presence, a self-effacing big guy with a constant smirk. He's the kind of guy that you meet at boring cocktail parties and stick close to, both because of his sharp wit and his complete lack of pretention. Besides, women are drawn to him like gossip columnists to Brad Pitt rumors, and there's always an outside shot that some of what he's got might rub off on you.

But even someone as charismatic as Tom Selleck is going to fail with material that's been recycled from a thousand previous sitcoms, each one more morbidly banal than the next.

Selleck plays Jack McLaren, an advertising executive fired from his high-profile, high-paying job at a Denver ad agency when he beats the President of the United States in golf. After passing on an offer from a rival firm, he decides to open up his own agency, taking a random collection of people from his old job (including one he met only 5 minutes earlier) with him. McLaren is known as The Closer because of his unparalleled skill in getting tricky deals done. And lest we forget, he has a heart of gold.

Shall we count the clichés? No, there's not enough room -- not even on the Web. But at least we can get the list started.

You've got the soon to be ex-wife; the troublemaking daughter with a heart of gold who's moving back in with Dad; the tough as nails on the outside but an old softie on the inside veteran (played by the man who practically invented the genre, Ed Asner); the naïve yet sophisticated buttoned down accountant with a hidden wild side just waiting to bust loose new girl; the sassy and sarcastic secretary; and the really annoying gofer who can never get a date even though he's really just a sensitive male underneath his wise cracking exterior guy.

McLaren's daughter Alex is the prototypical rebellious youth of family sitcoms. McLaren wants her to go to college; she wants to be a professional snowboarder. For some reason, this involves going to Italy, because Lord knows, there's no place to snowboard in the middle of the Rocky mountains. Early on in the episode, McLaren and Alex have a heart-to-heart about growing up. It is a truly heartwarming moment, one television audiences everywhere will know by heart. Not from their own experiences as parents, but because it's exactly the same one you've seen a hundred times before in every sitcom from Family Ties to The Torkelsons.

Asner's character is Dobbs, the genius creative director who gave McLaren his start in advertising. Dobbs is a diabetic, which just reeks of future Very Special Episode possibilities. How watching Ed Asner lapse into a diabetic coma is potentially funny, I don't know, but it's clear that the brain trust behind The Closer is going to milk it for all it's worth. The first stab at the topic is right there in the pilot: "Excuse me, I have to go inject this stocky fellow with insulin."

Perennial lawn ornament Penelope Ann Miller has a major role as the accountant Erica, transferred to McLaren's Denver office from New York. For some reason McLaren, who is the epitome of an ice-cold, calculating businessman, gives Erica a job at his new place even though he doesn't know her name.

Oh, wait, I forgot--it's because he has a heart of gold.

Bruno, played by David Krumholz, is a character so annoying that I'm starting to understand why Elvis kept shooting his TV sets. Why do television writers, who evidently are trained using the exact same textbook the world over, insist on using these teeth-gratingly awful caricatures? Is the world really better off watching the likes of the maybe-he's-gay-maybe-he's-not lackey on Veronica's Closet? Or the moronic Cynthia, love interest of ER's Dr. Mark Greene? Or the master of the one-note performance, Just Shoot Me's David Spade?

The Closer isn't a horrible blight on the TV screens of America, like America's Funniest Home Videos or World's Deadliest Swarms. It's not going to be responsible for the decline of the Western world or convince kids to burn down their houses. If it was, at least there would be a reason to watch it.

As it stands now, The Closer is nothing more than space filler lodged between commercials, a moving image only moderately more enjoyable than a test pattern. If Selleck really wants to prove he's a businessman with a heart of gold, he'll take pity on the viewers, close up shop on The Closer and get started making those Magnum reunion movies.

For more on The Closer go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closer_(1998_TV_series)

For a page dedicated to Tom Selleck go to www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Bungalow/3458/indexts.htm