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It was the kind of face you could study.
He had theater degrees from Stanford and Juilliard, but they might as well have been for music.
When he acted, the words were notes; the sentences, lyrics; every monologue, an aria.
Even his nonverbal sounds were inspired: thehmmms, the chuckles, the sniffs.
The voice could reassure, cajole, bully, inspire.
It could burn away lies.
It was a show where people used words the way other crime-show characters used fists.
You adored Pembleton because the character was so complex and Braugher so thrilling to see and hear.
They were likely to include counterintuitive hesitations and repetitions as well as bonus hyphens, em-dashes and ellipses.
He didnt just put across the text and subtext: He marked it up and added footnotes.
And where does she end up?
Pembleton sweeps his hand over two windowed sides of the station and croak-sings, BAAAAAAAAHHHHL-tih-moar.
Each pair of detectives on the show was surprising and pleasurable in its own way.
But the teamwork of Pembleton and his partner Bayliss, played by Kyle Secor, was a level up.
You waited for that moment where one or the other would say something provocative and the other would react.
He got his voice back faster than theyd envisioned because having Andre Braughernottalk was bumming everyone out.
Yet he goes face-to-face with Morgan Freeman and Denzel in movie-star flamethrower mode and walks away only mildly crisped.
The breadcrumb moment occurs in a scene where Searles ishumiliated during bayonet practice.
Life goes on, and its better to be embarrassed than dead.
But Braugher often seemed to have more fun in parts where the stakes were smaller and the laughs bigger.
A whole documentary could be fashioned just from scenes where Holt is called upon to play drunk.
Sometimes the character is drunk and seems drunk.
Other times hes drunk but trying to seem like hes not.
(In one such scene, a tipsy Holt pronounces the word Nothing as Nuh-THING???
in aBugs Bunnyindrag falsetto.)
A tour-de-force sequence finds Holt needing to strategically play drunk at a party.
Frank Pembleton would have delivered a bitter, blistering monologue about that.
Ray Holt would have tied one on and muttered while constructing a balloon replica, impeccably pronouncing French terms.
And Braugher would have dazzled as both, making every word sing.
