On TNT, \'Major Crimes\' Replaces (and Gets a Boost From) \'The Closer\'

By BRIAN STELTER

The debut of “Major Crimes,” TNT's replacement for “The Closer,” scored nearly 7.2 million viewers on Monday night, making it the most popular new series on cable this year, TNT said on Tuesday.

The new drama retained most of the 9.1 million viewers that had tuned in for the series finale of “The Closer” an hour earlier. That's not surprising since the new show has, as Mike Hale of The New York Times said on Monday, the “same setting (not to mention sets), same music, same writers and directors, nearly the same cast” as “The Closer” had.

Next Monday, “Major Crimes” will slide into the time slot “The Closer” had.

Led by Kyra Sedgwick, “The Closer” has been the most popular drama on cable television. Citing preliminary Nielsen ratings, TNT said that the series finale on Monday was its second-most-popular episode, behind a midseason finale in 2007 that had about 9.2 million viewers on the day it was televised.

Of course, digital video recorders have proliferated since then; TNT said in a news release that it expected that Monday's episode would surpass the one in 2007 “when final data becomes available in two weeks.”


Until now the most-watched new cable series of the year was “Dallas,” also on TNT, which had 6.9 million viewers out of the gate in June.