Kyra Sedgwick up close

On Monday night at 9, Kyra Sedgwick returns for season five of TNT’s “The Closer,” the highest-rated program on basic cable.
In a conference call last month, the 43-year-old actress talked about her character, Brenda Leigh Johnson, and the upcoming season of the police procedural.

The season ahead:
“This year’s theme is ‘change,’ and I think the most obvious change is Brenda being married, and there’s been some shifts in the squad. The first few episodes, the cat is unwell and I think that that’s a change that she doesn’t want to have to deal with, the idea of possibility of life without her cat, who in some ways is sort of her independent self.”

Brenda’s evolution:
“I think that she has become more of a maternal figure for everybody, and I think that in some ways that was sort of inevitable because she is sort of a loving maternal person in some ways, even though I don’t know that she’ll ever actually have her own children.”

The show’s overwhelming attraction to audiences:
“I think that we really do emotionally involve people in each specific crime and also in each specific character. And if you let people in in a different kind of way, there’s a lot of accessibility, emotionally, to these characters and to what they are going through.”

Acting on the small screen:
“I think it was such a leap of faith. I think it always is whenever you take on a creative project, but I think this one especially because it was such a long commitment. It’s been a great journey. It’s been one of the most, if not the most, creatively fulfilling jobs I’ve ever had.”