God Bless TV

Damages
FX continues its quest to brand itself as the basic-cable HBO with its latest exceptional offering, Damages. After Glenn Close’s stint as a ball-busting police captain on the fourth season of The Shield met with both critical and viewer praise, the execs at FX concluded to design a starring vehicle tailored to Close’s strengths. Damages is the result of this decision and it delivers exponentially on its initial promise. Close (Fatal Attraction) stars as Patty Hewes, a high-powered Manhattan lawyer who has taken on a class action lawsuit filed by the employees of billionaire businessman Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson, Cheers), a man who has been accused of bilking those employees’ pension funds of millions upon millions of dollars. Now, lest you think that this is some boring procedural about dull, white-collar crime, know that the series opens with a battered and bloody woman named Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne, 28 Weeks Later) fleeing her apartment building before being picked up by police on the suspicion of murdering her fiancé. Through the use of flashbacks that take us back to six months prior to the open of the series, we learn that Ellen is a recent law school graduate who has landed a prime position at Hewes’s firm despite warnings that working for Hewes can be dangerous to one’s health. The curiosity of these warnings and how Ellen ended up as a potential murderer serve as the series’ hook. Did Frobisher get to her or were the warnings about Hewes true? One of the most effective aspects of Damages is that it blurs the line between the standard good guy/bad guy convention. A typical series would set Hewes up as the white-hatted hero coming to save the day for the disenfranchised employees that were seemingly cheated by Frobisher, who himself would have been portrayed as a greedy, uncaring menace. Damages doesn’t do that. Instead, by the end of the pilot Hewes has proven her mettle as a Machiavellian genius by committing an unspeakable act that one usually doesn’t see out of a typical protagonist. As Frobisher, Danson (who after toiling for years in sitcom hell is a revelation here) shows surprising depth of character in portraying the various layers of a man torn between business and family. Another effective tool at Damages’ disposal is its use of flashbacks throughout each episode. The audience is provided bits and pieces of an account that will ultimately tell the story of how Ellen ended up as she did. Characters that seem insignificant on first glance can carry much more importance as we learn how all of the pieces fit together. Essentially, Damages is a giant puzzle that is constantly shifting in unexpected directions and, after the failures of Dirt and The Riches, is a show that continues FX on its path as the destination for HBO-lite programming.

Dirty Rating: 86/100


Burn Notice
Take a CIA agent, essentially steal his life from him by eliminating any evidence that he ever existed, and watch him scramble to figure out who screwed him over. Should be a no-brainer success, right? Ah… not so much. Burn Notice takes this promising idea and whips it into a light and insubstantial televised version of a beach read. Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan, Crossing Jordan) is the wronged agent who’s given a “burn notice” – the government has blacklisted him, frozen all of his accounts and assets, and forbidden anyone from his professional life to have any contact with him. Eventually ending up in his hometown of Miami, Westen enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend (and former IRA agent) Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar, The Tudors) and fellow disgraced agent Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell, The Evil Dead) to help him track down who’s behind his burn notice. Since he has no money, Westen is forced to take on menial PI jobs to make ends meet. Whereas this could have been a dark and brooding affair, creator Matt Nix plays the series for laughs. It’s treated much too lightly and I suppose for some, this is good enough. Yeah… not for me, though. I don’t want to see a trained killer gallivanting around with his ex trying to figure out how some little old lady was taken by con artists. Fuck that. I want governmental conspiracies and double-crosses and backstabbings and all of that shit. Unfortunately, since Burn Notice is on the USA Network, it has to fit the network aesthetic, meaning that it’s genetically bred to be televised junk food (see also: Monk, Psych, and basically every other original series on the friggin’ network). Ironically, one of the last times that USA ventured away from its safe formula was with the bleak Touching Evil, which starred… Jeffrey Donovan as well. No one (except for me, I think) actually watched it. For some reason, unlike Touching Evil, Burn Notice has done extremely well in the ratings as people are eating this crap up. For me, I’m gonna need something a little more significant to sink my teeth into and Burn Notice ain’t it.

Dirty Rating: 48/100