Rizzoli & Isles: The Complete Seventh and Final Season

TNT's long-running series about Boston police detective Jane Rizzoli (Angie Harmon) and her pal, chief medical examiner Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander), here comes to a close. After quickly wrapping up the previous season's arc about Alice Sands (Annabeth Gish), the mad stalker who targeted Jane along with her family and friends, the show settles into its usual pattern of alternating homicide cases featuring quirky twists—one involving a zombie movie fan convention, another the legend of a murderous ghost, and a third having a victim placed in a casket alongside a corpse about to be buried—with personal subplots, including Maura's surgery and the distress of Jane's mother, Angela (Lorraine Bracco), over the news that her daughter intends to leave the police force and take a job with the FBI in Washington. Rizzoli's career change is only one element of the “summing up” quality of these last episodes, which also include the retirement of her longtime partner Korsak (Bruce McGill) and the assembling of a series of video testimonials by the various characters, which allows the cast to speak directly into the camera (effectively addressing loyal viewers). Rizzoli & Isles has never been an especially exciting or hard-edged show, but this final season feels even softer and more unimaginative than previous ones (an episode in which Jane goes undercover in prison, for example, dusts off one of the oldest clichés of the genre and then does little with it). For longtime fans, however, this is an amiable send-off. Presenting all 13 episodes from the 2016 seventh and final season, extras include a gag reel. A strong optional purchase (F. Swietek)