By Scott Buckner
If you like your women cold and hard as a well-digger’s ass in January, you’ll like FX’s new series, Damages. (Tuesday’s premiere episode, which I wasn’t home to see Tuesday, is being re-run several times tonight and probably to death this weekend, so you’ll have ample chance to see it.) If you like legal dramas where you sit there the whole time trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on but you go along for the ride anyway because it’s not often that you get to see the dark, manipulative underbelly of the legal profession, you’ll like this show, too.
I like my women a bit softer than that, and there are times when I don’t feel like working that hard in order to enjoy a TV show, but it’s still a show worth watching because it solidifies common opinion that lawyers suck.
Glenn Close plays Patty Hewes, a class-action lawyer so prominent she’s a familiar face on Greta Van Susteren’s legal talk show. Close does Ice Queen WASP perfectly, giving us the impression that Hewes is capable of shooting laser beams of death from her eyes and shitting razor blades without wincing, and would eat little children if there was any money in it.
“If you were a man, I’d kick the living dog shit out of you,” Hewes’ opponent in a case tells her on the courthouse steps after she tricks him into making what’s obviously going to be a case-losing gaffe in front of the jury’s foreman, who happens to be wandering back from lunch. New York City’s judicial system is pretty decent. They send you to Quizno’s.
“If you were a man, I’d be worried,” she shoots back. No, this is not a woman who would tolerate erectile dysfunction well. Or for long. Still, she likes a good bourbon, laments her parenting skills, and can recite Emily Dickinson. Talk about a complex ball of something that you can’t wait to start unraveling before your eyes at some point.
The show revolves around two issues, one more mysterious than the other, and jumps between present day and six months ago without telling you, exactly. That’s when you realize this is one of those shows where, if you blink too often or don’t have TiVo, you’ll be hopelessly lost until the end of the season. On one hand, there’s the mysterious case of a half-naked, blood-drenched woman found wandering about the streets of New York in a green trench coat. That’s the thing that happened today. On the other hand, there’s the case of bazillionaire Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), a silver-fox sorta guy in his 60s so amazingly dynamic and big-dog that he zooms around doing ATV motocross for kicks without worrying about breaking a hip. That’s what was happening six months ago.
Arthur unloaded a boatload of his company stock, sending his 5,000 employees down the river by leaving them out of work and pensionless. “I’m a rich man, but I’m also a reasonable man,” Arthur says, so he offers his broke workers $100 million to go away. The employees want the settlement, but Patty thinks they can get – and deserve – more by taking it to a jury because, well, she’s so good (and rich, apparently) that she only takes cases she is passionate about.
“I say we take this money and get on with our lives” says one of the unemployed Frobisher workers. It doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that getting on won’t be that easy on a check for $26.32 once prominent class-action lawyers like Patty Hewes take their cut.
Compounding the whole mess is freshly-hired associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), who’s engaged to first-year hospital resident David Connor (Noah Bean). Ellen is exactly as bland as Kristin Davis’ Charlotte York in Sex and the City, which makes it all the more interesting when it turns out that she’s the bloody mess wandering the street in a trench coat at 7 a.m., and David is the bloody mess lying on the apartment floor. Yet, the show jumps between Ellen being hired six months ago and today, when the cops are trying to figure out what to do with this gory, uncommunicative mess of a woman.
Still, this is an FX original program, so things never are what they appear and they turn on a dime, which is why Rescue Me is so good. Is Arthur really a bad guy? Is Patty really a good guy? Did good girl Ellen flip out and go bad, or did someone else?
Who knows. When you’re on this kind of trip, it’s best for us kids in the back seat to just shut up and let dad drive.
*
The What I Watched Last Night library is open for your perusal.
Posted on July 26, 2007