Major Crimes Boss James Duff Reveals Spoilers From Season 5

Mary McDonnell is back in action as Los Angeles Police Capt. Sharon Raydor, who is in charge of a special squad within the LAPD that deals with high-profile or particularly sensitive crimes, when Major Crimes returns for its Season 5 summer episodes.

Tonight the squad investigates the mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl, who vanished while volunteering at a homeless shelter, and tech expert Buzz Watson (Phillip P. Keene) cracks open the decades old “cold case” file on the unsolved murder of his father and uncle.

Captain Raydor’s team of investigators includes G.W. Bailey as Lt. Provenza, Tony Denison as Lt. Andy Flynn, Michael Paul Chan as Lt. Mike Tao, Raymond Cruz as Detective Julio Sanchez, and Kearran Giovanni as Detective Amy Sykes.

Major Crimes creator and executive producer James Duff spoke to Parade.com revealing sneak peeks for the new season — including an exclusive — of the police drama. Check it out:

When we return for Season 5’s summer episodes, are we back to the normal one case per episode after last winter’s 5-episode case?

That’s the way we usually do it in the summer. We feel like asking people to commit to a 13-episode case would be a lot. We have a theme that unites our season, even if we don’t have a continuing mystery. Actually, we do have a continuing mystery. We’re going to look at the murder of Buzz’s father and uncle that was never solved, and that’s going to run through the entire length of the episodes, and as part of Identity, which is Rusty’s (Graham Patrick Martin) web series.

What can you reveal about upcoming cases?

Episode two starts with Sanchez being stood up on a date. He’s trying to use the internet to do it, which is the common way of going about it nowadays. When he gets stood up, he sees an undercover police officer also at the bar who gestures, “Don’t blow my cover.” Back at work the next day, he learns that the undercover police officer is dead and was apparently off duty. So, it’s a strange crime that has to do with the porn industry and is a little racier maybe than our usual episodes.

Then in episode three, we have a terrorist beheading on American soil. We don’t know where the terrorist is, but we’re trying to locate his victim via the video tape, but the video tape doesn’t have any geographic markers, so it’s kind of hard for the FBI to locate him. We end up helping and it becomes a little bit of a turf battle.

Then in episode four, Flynn and Sharon are considering moving in together, and Flynn wants to sell his house in Valencia and shorten his commute. At first, he suggests he’ll just rent a place in Silver Lake and then she says, “Maybe we should just move in.” He finds a house that he really likes, but Sharon is too busy to come and see it. It has multiple offers on it, so he brings Provenza as another pair of eyes and Buzz to film, and, as they’re going through it, they find the realtor who listed it dead floating in the swimming pool, which Provenza immediately points out will take several thousand dollars off the price.

Provenza is like, “Is this a house you really want?,” and Flynn says, “Yes. I really want this house.” So, Provenza goes out and talks to the media, which he doesn’t like to do, and he says, “Well, this is a terrible crime. The LAPD doesn’t like to use words cursed or haunted…,” which shakes up all the other people who’ve put in offers because they’re murder suspects.

Then in episode six, an English couple, who are celebrating their second honeymoon following the husband’s four-year battle with cancer, are reliving their honeymoon by driving down the California coast, and when they get to Venice, a guy tries to snatch her purse and the husband fights the guy off and gets shot to death.

There’s been an ongoing crime spree in Venice, and now the $20 billion Los Angles tourist industry is at risk. There’s an English journalist who’s covering the story and turns it into a cause célèbre because of guns in America. So this foreign journalist is saying this could never happen anywhere else, and there is the threat that England might put Los Angles on its watch list for tourists, which is bad.

Then here’s an exclusive, which is fun. As mentioned, Sanchez’s dating life is not going very well, and he’s applied to be a foster parent, so one entire case is done while the Department of Children and Family Services interviews all of his coworkers about his suitability to be a parent.

Having a child is a transformational experience, and I think people want to have transformational experiences in their life. That’s why people get married. We know getting married is going to change us and that we will not be the same person after we are married that we were before. Having children changes us, too. We cannot be the same person after having children that we were before. I don’t know this from personal experience but from observation. So, he is seeking transformation.

Speaking of transformation, Rusty has done quite a bit of that. I like what you did in the first episode. The first thing I thought when I saw Rusty was, “Oh, he cut his hair,” and then you actually put that into the dialogue.

He is going to let it grow out over this season, but we wanted to do a story where — because how many times have you known a boy who got his hair cut and didn’t want to go out of the house? It’s like a rite of passage, the bad haircut. Also, we hadn’t changed his hair in so long that we wanted to note his progression a little bit into a college student because last year he still looked 17.

It’s risky aging him up, I know, but we just felt like we had to let him grow a little. I am glad you liked the reference. He liked it too. It was not in the original. I didn’t know how short he’d cut his hair. I knew it was short but I didn’t know how short. He said, “Can I cut it off?” And I said, “Yeah, go ahead.” And he cut it off, but I didn’t know he was going to cut it that short, and he didn’t know it was going to take that long to grow back either. He was like, “Wow, I thought it would be back faster.”

You know how Dick Wolf always talks about ripped from the headlines stories, what’s the inspiration for where you get your cases?

I like to say that we’re ripped from the heart instead of the headlines. The theme for these upcoming episodes recommended itself to us because we’re still trying to figure out how to balance our professional lives with our personal lives, how to balance competing interests inside our families, how to balance our virtual life with our real lives, how to balance pragmatism and idealism, and how to balance our rational selves with our more basic instincts. These are issues that also are at the heart of some crimes.

So, we think of a theme and then we just relentlessly dramatize that theme. It’s not necessary to know the theme to enjoy the show. It’s underneath the material, so you don’t have to know that’s what’s going on to enjoy the mystery.

And our inspiration…I can actually tell you how we do it. The writers all get together in a room for the first week, and we talk about the characters, we talk about story ideas, and we write them all on a great big board. We usually fill up the board with about 50 story ideas and then we think of individual themes having to do with our über theme like, “Let’s do one about how to balance reality with your expectations.” Then we find a crime that fits into that, we find the emotional center of that, and then we build out so that it also is touching one of our characters. It’s a little add on to a mystery series that’s really based on examining the justice system, which is also about balance. 

Can you name any upcoming guest stars?

Firearms Francine comes back, that’s Cheryl White. Ever Carradine comes back as Rusty’s biological mother. Rene Rosado comes back as Gus. Jon Tenney comes back as Deputy Chief Fitz Howard.

Is Fitz the liaison on the episode with the FBI?

He does liaison some with the FBI and he’s in a lot of the scenes. Then D.B. Sweeney comes back as FBI Special Agent Morris. And then we’ll have…I can’t name the guest star yet because it’s a roll-out for episode six, but the English tourist is being played by a Downton Abbey alumni.

In the five episode arc last winter, Amy was talking to Jason Gedrick’s character on the DL, was there any fallout for her?

There wasn’t really any fallout because everybody got caught up in that, and that’s what Sharon says, “Everybody is caught up in this.” She did confront Amy, and Amy gave her the book, but the truth is Amy did nothing wrong. She actually followed through on what Sharon’s first impulse was, which was “I need to talk to you.” Chief Taylor (Robert Gossett) was the one who put Jason’s character off limits after Amy had already gone out there and talked to him.

So, she was in something of a bind, but she took very good notes, and she transcribed everything by hand, which you don’t have to do. You can do that mechanically nowadays and she didn’t do it. She transcribed it all by hand and kept a good record. She is the one most likely, I guess, to go off the reservation of our current group of detectives. She’s done it now twice in a big way. Also, I’ve got to say that I thought she and Jason had great chemistry together, and we’re going to try to bring him back if we get extra episodes.

Major Crimes returns tonight for its Season 5 summer episodes at 10 p.m. ET/PT on TNT.