‘Criminal Minds’ women play spy game for photo shoot

By Jay Bobbin © Zap2it

Their minds may be on criminals, but their bodies still like to play dress-up.

Such was the appeal to the female stars of CBS’ long-running Wednesday series “Criminal Minds” — Paget Brewster, A.J. Cook and Kirsten Vangsness — when they participated earlier this year in a photo shoot for the June issue of CBS Watch! Magazine. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Tysons Corner, Va. (just outside Washington, D.C.), proved to have all the swanky settings needed for the shoot’s storyline casting the women as high-class spies tailing an international bad guy.

Brewster, alias FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit agent Emily Prentiss on “Criminal Minds,” says while on location for the occasion that the feel is “very film-noir, three undercover chicks taking down a James Bond-villain archetype. It’s been really fun, and the stylists gave us great clothes, so we’re excited. I think we’re all buying one of our dresses!”

Techno-genius Penelope Garcia on the show, Vangsness believes the shoot’s approach makes total sense. “There actually are more female spies than male spies, but they’re so good, you just don’t know about them,” she muses. “I’m a theater girl, and I always glam up more there than for I do for TV stuff, so I feel very much at home with this.”

The shoot’s theme was a collaboration between celebrity photographer Matt Hoyle and Jeremy Murphy, CBS Watch! editor-in-chief. Hoyle explains the magazine’s staff “saw some of my more cinematic stuff, and I think they were inspired by that. They said, ‘We want to do a spy theme, but we want you to make it your own.’ I created this amal- gam of all the spy movies I’ve seen, so it has a little of the Cold War espionage of the ’40s and ’50s, but a couple of the shots are more modern and sleek and Angelina Jolie-esque like ‘La Femme Nikita.’ ”

The long day of photography also took the actresses to a chilly parking garage, where they willingly vamped it up in a “Charlie’s Angels”-type setup ... with Brewster, wearing only a black leotard, understandably racing for a bathrobe to warm up as soon as Hoyle got each shot. While he knew “Criminal Minds” to a degree, he admits, “I wanted to come at this as a blank slate. I wanted to create characters who stand on their own, and (the actresses have) mentioned to me that they’re having fun playing parts that are new and of another time.”

Indeed, Cook — who returned to the series this season as BAU operative Jennifer “JJ” Jareau — reflects, “I don’t think it’s even anywhere in the realm of what we play on the show. It’s fun to escape and fantasize, and that’s what this whole thing has felt like. They just came up with a great concept, and it’s been a great experience.”

Web Links

On Sunday, A&E Network’s “Breakout Kings” ends its second season following U.S. marshals who use current fugitives to chase others on the run. Learn more at www.aetv.com/breakout-kings/

CBS’ hit drama “The Good Wife” ends its third season Sunday, but it’s already been renewed for next year. Catch up at www. cbs.com/shows/the_good_ wife/

Ron Ben-Israel is Food Network’s sincerely

Fans of Food Network’s fantastical dessert competition “Sweet Genius” have noticed a few intriguing changes in the multisensory sensation’s second season, now airing on Thursday nights. Most notably, the Sweet Genius – New York pastry chef Ron Ben-Israel – finally gets to be, well, sweet. In other words, himself.

The Israel-born former modern dancer laughs when asked about this kinder, gentler Genius.

“In the first season the producers really wanted to frighten the chefs,” he explains, “But pretty soon we realized that they are going to be afraid of me, one way or another. And I always wanted to encourage them. So it’s a compromise. I get to encourage them – and then we give them such impossible ingredients and hard challenges that it’s still scary.”

The new season’s other change is equally sweet. Contestants ready to create the unique baked desserts and fanciful frozen confections that so vexed their predecessors in their pursuit of each episode’s $10,000 prize found that the game had changed, too. They would be creating chocolate desserts, candies and – yikes! – cakes for the cake master, himself.

“I had to try every little dessert in the first season,” Ben-Israel says of his decision to tweak the challenges. “And I concluded that sometimes with crazy, crazy ingredients the result would not exactly be, shall we say, appetizing? We also have to deal with very attractive desserts, because we eat first with our eyes, and it’s so hard – even with more friendly