RIZZOLI & ISLES, concluding its second season on TNT tonight, is a fan favorite. Not only is the series, based on Tess Gerritsen’s novels, a snappy crime-solving procedural, but it provides a view of supportive female friendship between its leads, Angie Harmon as police detective Jane Rizzoli and Sasha Alexander as coroner Maura Isles, that is rare on television.

This season, Maura has opened her home to Jane’s recently divorced mother Angie, played by Lorraine Bracco. Both actresses, as well as series production designer Bruce Miller, are on hand in the set for Maura's living room. The space is beautiful, airy and wonderfully detailed – for example, a large ornamental pot turns out on examination to be made of thousands of tiny seashells. Visual themes running through this environment, as well as Maura's office set, include both water and death, with the skeletons of starfish and other marine life on display. The two performers and the designer zing off each other with relaxed ease as they answer – and sometimes ask each other – questions about their work on RIZZOLI & ISLES.

ASSIGNMENT X: Did you have any input into any of the production design elements in your character's home?

SASHA ALEXANDER: [Series creator/show runner] Janet Tamaro and I had a conversation when they were doing the house and the office, and it was really just about style. I said to Janet, I felt like [Maura] was Provence-meets-Bali. I felt like this was someone who was well-traveled, who clearly has a quirky and eclectic eye and might have picked up things along her journeys. Bruce is our production designer, and he put that together. So he did an amazing job. These are all new sets this year.

AX: Is there a narrative reason for Maura's interest in the ocean, based on the production design of the home?

BRUCE MILLER: They're dead things. We didn't realize it when we started, but it's all skeletal, and as it kind of blossomed – she's been around the world, she's been in the ocean – the images I thought were really interesting, with fluids, and then the shells came out. She deals with dead humans and then she brings all the dead animals and skeletal things that have some beauty to it. We didn't develop it that way. It just kind of happened. And then the decorator came in here one day and said, "Gee, I've created all of these skeletal things." She deals with skeletons, and she brings the same thing to her house, but it’s the beauty part of it."

ALEXANDER: [Maura's] office [set has] the most amazing picture of five women doing an autopsy.

MILLER: That was a college in New England, I believe.

ALEXANDER: What year?

MILLER: 1895.

ALEXANDER: And it's a real photograph. I also have to add that I feel like in this space [the sets for Maura's home], and also in Maura's office, the beautiful thing that they did was add a tremendous amount of humor to it as well. It's eclectic, it has personality and it feels like these things were found along the way.

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