Jeffrey Donovan in Burn Notice TV seriesUSA Network has renewed its superb espionage comedy-drama Burn Notice, according to a report on TV Guide’s website. The brief story says that USAN has ordered another thirteen episodes.

The program, which airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. EDT, grabbed an impressive 4.4 million viewers last week, up a full million from the previous week. Clearly its audience is building thanks to laudatory reviews such as this author’s own, and highly positive word of mouth among discerning viewers.

In addition, Turner Network Television has renewed Saving Grace, the spicy new religious drama starring Holly Hunter. According to TNT, the critically acclaimed series amassed on July 23 the largest audience for a new ad-supported cable series premiere for the year, bringing in more than 6.4 million viewers, as documented by Nielsen data. The show has averaged 5.5 million viewers so far.

Finally, TNT has also renewed The Closer for another season, which will be the series’ fourth. The police-detection drama starring Kyra Sedgwick is the largest-audience series of all time on ad-supported cable, and greatly merits both a big viewership and renewal for another year. The show is averaging 7.8 million viewers including time-shifters—it is the most ad-supported cable’s most DVRed drama.

 

Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer TV series

Now in its third season, the program continues to feature the highest quality of writing, acting, and production values. (See stories here and here.) A recent episode, "Dumb Luck", had the best screenplay of any TV series I’ve seen this year, with a complex but coherent story line, strong characterizations, and some very clever humor as the authors and performers managed to breathe some new life into the cliched "dumb blonde golddigger" type. Full episodes of The Closer are available for download here.

 

All of this is very good cultural news, for although all three of these shows are fairly "adult" in many of the scenes they depict, they are, unlike most of the cultural products of our time, also quite adult in their attitudes and worldview.

That is a tradeoff that we should all gladly make.