By Curt Schleier

TNT has a great one-two punch on Monday nights in THE CLOSER’s Kyra Sedgwick (at 9 p.m.) and SAVING GRACE’s Holly Hunter (at 10 p.m.), two strong women as far apart temperamentally as Hillary Clinton and Ann Coulter. Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson (Sedgwick) is an angel whose biggest sin is the stash of chocolate she leaves hidden in her desk. Grace Hanadarko (Hunter) desperately needs an angel, and anything sweet is entirely out of character. It is the kind of ratings-building combination that likely leaves broadcast network executives green with envy.
   
Grace is a troubled Oklahoma City police detective who is street smart and personally stupid. If there’s a bad decision to be made in her life, she’ll do it, whether it’s sleeping with fellow (and married) cops to paying far too much attention to her close friend Jack Daniels. She’s on a dangerous downward spiral when she’s intercepted by a last chance angel, a tobacco-chewing vision named Earl (Leon Rippy).(What a choice for a name. The last Earl I knew was a wife beater dispatched by the Dixie Chicks.)
   
You’d think Grace would be happy for a second chance at salvation, but she continues to fight redemption and Earl to a standstill with all the will power of biblical Jacob. God or no god she continues to get dressed and undressed near her neighbor’s window giving the elderly gentleman his daily dose of adrenaline.
   
Earl is patient—and politically correct. “God doesn’t care about churches, temples or mosques,” he tells her.
   
Of course not, Grace replies. “God cares if I sleep with married men.”
   
But there’s a murder to be solved here, that of a partner in an oil rig found dead by a night watchman. Everyone seems to be lying to the cops: the watchman, the widow and the partner. But, suspicion momentarily centers on a black man with a criminal past who happens to be the brother of Grace’s boss, Lt. Ykon (Roger Aaron Brown).
   
The lieutenant is a straight-arrow while his brother has apparently been — how to say this — a tremendous disappointment to his family. And the cop refuses to forgive the criminal, even though the latter is apparently going straight.  Forget the homicide. I knew the answer to that almost as soon as Grace did. What was going to make this interesting in a barfing sort of way was the heart-warming reunion between brothers, who’d march off hand-in-hand together.
   
That was not to be. True to their cynical roots, the folks at GRACE came up with an ending that is dead bang perfect — and those of you who’ve seen the show know what I mean.
   
SAVING GRACE has the makings of becoming the kind of breakout hit THE CLOSER was three years ago. On the merits, it deserves it.