SPOILER ALERT – The following article contains MAJOR spoilers about the fifth season of Major Crimes, that some readers may wish to avoid.
Camryn Manheim, best known to UK audiences for her 8 season run as Boston attorney Ellenor Frutt on David E. Kelley’s legal series The Practice, has joined TNT’s flagship drama series Major Crimes for a multi-episode arc.
Her casting comes in the wake of the most recent episode, White Lies Part 1, in which white supremacist Dwight Darnell opened fire in a coutroom, wounding several people, including Dr Joe Bowman (Bill Brochtrup), and killing LAPD Assistant Chief Russell Taylor (Robert Gossett), before ultimately being taken down by Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell).
Per TVLine, who first reported Manheim’s casting, she will play a Deputy Chief within the Los Angeles Police Department who is in the running to replace Taylor as Assistant Chief of Operations. Other candidates to fill the post include LAPD Special Operations Bureau Deputy Chief Fritz Howard (Jon Tenney), who is currently serving in the position in an acting capacity; and Major Crimes Division CO, Captain Sharon Raydor. Manheim will first appear in the fourteenth episode of the season, the first of the eight episode back order, which is set to air in 2017.
Major Crimes creator and showrunner James Duff previewed the storyline of a largely leaderless LAPD, following the murder of Assistant Chief Taylor, in an upcoming interview with TVWise. “There will be a power vacuum that is created that throws everyone off balance. All I would say about that is… it would not be a story about balance if I did not try to push people off their paths and see how they managed”.
