FLAWED CHARACTER BRINGS TV STAR BACK
Emmy winner is on television again with a 10-episode mystery story
After ending a seven-year, Emmywinning run on The Closer in 2012, Kyra Sedgwick has finally returned to prime-time TV.
On ABC’s Ten Days in the Valley (Sundays at 10 p.m.), she plays a Type double-A TV producer and writer Jane Sadler, hooked on booze, coke and more. Her character is smart and accomplished, also deeply flawed and guilt-ridden. She’s a single mother whose only child is snatched from under her nose one night.
Jane now has a mission: Find her child and the malefactors, while fighting off her own demons. I spoke this week with Sedgwick, 52. Here is an edited version of our chat:
Five years is a long time to be gone from prime time. Why so long?
I’m gonna be perfectly honest: I haven’t been flooded with offers. Yeah, I could give you the usual “I’ve been looking for the right thing,” et cetera, but the truth is, I haven’t been flooded with offers. Yes, the idea of doing TV was scary to me for a few years because I was like, “I’m never going to have a situation as great as ( The Closer).” The show was so beloved and it felt like a lot to live up to.
Did you and do you like working in TV or were you looking more for movie roles?
I love working in television because it affords you episode after episode to explore character. In a film, you have an hour and a half, two hours, to show everybody a human being. This is more generous with the time and you get to luxuriate in knowing that you don’t have to show a million different colours in a short, finite period.
I’m puzzled — I thought this was the greatest of TV times for top female actors, thanks partly to the bar you
helped raise. What gives? There are not a lot of great parts. Even though time and again we proved we can make money and get eyes to watch, they make more shows that are male-dominated, or male cast. (Time Warner CEO) Jeff Bewkes once told me, if only other shows were making as much as The Closer was for this company then we’d all be doing our jobs right.
Not to be naive — OK, let me rephrase, to be perfectly naive, why aren’t there more shows on TV with female leads?
The people who are sitting in those decision-making rooms are mostly men.
Tell me about Jane — she certainly is complex.
I find her authentic and real. Most of us reach for something — an Adderall, booze, TV, food, shopping, whatever — to try to take the edge off the anxiety and pressure. And she is under a lot of pressure. And when she walks into her writer’s room her co-writers blame her immediately: “Oh, we were here at 7 a.m.!” People also wonder whether she’s a good mother, but we never ask whether someone is a good father, or if he’s flawed or not likable. That kind of shaming and categorizing is left for women. But I’m fascinated by her. ( Ten Days) is a mystery thriller but it’s really about getting to the bottom of who this woman is and why she is the way she is.
What’s the future for Ten Days and what’s your next act?
It will definitely be a close-ended mystery, but there will be some unsolved pieces of the mystery. There will be a satisfying end. I also directed a film this year (Lifetime’s Story of a Girl, which starred her husband, Kevin Bacon, and daughter, Sosie). I’d love to do more directing.