'Rizzoli & Isles' Second-Season Success Brings New Challenges For New London Native

A New London native, the creator and executive producer of the TNT crime series Rizzoli & Isles, says the downside of her show's success is the additional stress.

"The second season, there's a lot more pressure," Janet Tamaro told Patch. "During the first season nobody expected anything. TNT was looking for a companion to The Closer and had been looking for a very long time. But now there's more pressure because everyone is looking to us to do the same thing again."

Doing the same thing means continuing to deliver solid ratings with her show about Boston detective Jane Rizzoli (Angie Harmon) and medical examiner Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander), characters based on the crime novels of Tess Gerritsen. In the first season, the two characters combined their sharp minds and quirky chemistry to take some notorious criminals off the streets of Boston. The second season began last month.

TNT has renewed crime solver Rizzoli & Isles for a third season, with an order for 15 additional episodes in 2012. Rizzoli & Isles launched out of The Closer this season with 8.6 million viewers, and remains basic cable’s two most-watched shows for the year to-date.

Tamaro was born in New London and attended grammar school in Groton through third grade. Her family moved to Massachusetts and then, a few years later, to California. She says she remains as fond as ever of her New England roots. "I love the East Coast," she said. "It smells, sounds and feels like home."

Few executive producers have arrived at their positions the way Tamaro did. After earning a bachelors degree from the University of California in Berkeley and a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University, she became a rising star at ABC News. She served as a national correspondent, covering major crimes, including the trial of O.J. Simpson.

“I was based in New York and we came to Los Angeles because my husband wanted to be a writer. That was his territory. I didn’t really think about doing it until I did it,” Tamaro said.

Initially, she was hired as a staff writer. Over the course of a decade, Tamaro wrote for Breaking News, Line of Fire, CSI: NY, Bones, Tell Me You Love Me and Trauma. She was nominated for an Emmy as part of the producing team of Showtime’s Sleeper Cell and she shared a Writers Guild Award for the first season of Lost.

With Rizzoli & Isles, Tamaro got to oversee her first show.

“This is my second profession,” she said. “They’re such different lives. All the things that drew me to reporting were what eventually repelled me.” She once loved the idea of hopping on a plane at a moment’s notice to cover some breaking story. Now she’s glad to leave that to others.

She’s also glad for the experience of reporting. “The thing I loved about it was that it forced me to think of different sides of every single issue and I still try to do that,” she said. “I still try to go into it not thinking this is the only right answer.”

With one series under her command, Tamaro has already begun to think about the next.

“I’d really like to create a show about journalists,” she mused. “I figure someday someone’s going to do it and I want it to be a former journalist, as opposed to a TV writer.”