I am a little late coming to Showcase’s latest dramatic success story, Ray Donovan, whose season one finale has just aired in the USA, along with the series finale of Dexter, to powerhouse ratings.
And to be honest my sluggard response to this series, which stars Emmy® and Golden Globe® Award nominee Liev Schrieber in his first ever television role (joining a host of movie stars like Kevin Spacey who have gone before him), possibly had a lot to do with anti-hero overload.
It’s not, of course, that I don’t like anti-heroes.
I mean, if I didn’t then the dramatic pickings over the last decade or so of TV seasons would have been slim indeed, with anti-heroes played by the likes of Bryan Cranston (Walter White, Breaking Bad), James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano, The Sopranos), Steve Buscemi (Nucky Thompson, Boardwalk Empire), David Duchovny (Hank Moody, Californication), Edie Falco (Jackie O’Hurley, Nurse Jackie) and Glenn Close (Patty Hewes, Damages) very much in vogue.
No, I think it has more to do with the fact that with so many of them on the screen, all of them beautifully constructed with just the right balance of flaws and appealing qualities (obviously less of the latter, and more of the former), finding room for another became just a little overwhelming, even in the fallow period between US TV seasons.
So I accumulated the episodes on my DVR but never ventured to watch them.
Till last night when my housemate’s boyfriend expressed an interest in checking out the show and we wandered into the dark, cobweb-laden nether regions of the DVR, searchlights on our head and hope in our hearts that we had room for another anti-hero in our viewing schedule.
And lo, we did find him, and to my great surprise and delight, liked him.
Yes, liked him.
Lord knows why.
Ray, a Bostonian transplanted to L.A. who works as a fixer for law firm Goldman and Drexler and spends his days cleaning up after celebrities with little to no sound judgement of their own (including a “straight” action star discovered with a transgender hooker and another who wakes up to find his pick up for the night has OD’d on cocaine), is as royally screwed up as anyone can get.
He has a psychopath for a father, Mickey (Jon Voight), who returns home to LA after a 20 year stint in prison courtesy of a framing by his son, determined to get some vengeance, two brothers with issues of their own, chronic addict Brendan aka “Bunchy” (Eddie Marsan) who can’t stay sober after being neglected as a child, Terry (Eddie Marsan) who has Parkinson’s disease and oversees the family’s boxing business and a newly discovered black half-brother Daryll (Pooch Hall) who isn’t quite in the inner circle yet.
Haunting them all emotionally is Bridget, their sister who killed herself when she was younger while high as a kite on drugs and threw herself off a building.
If that wasn’t taxing enough, his relationships with his whiny wife Abby (Paula Malcomson), who dreams of a life quite a few rungs up the ladder and is unhappy they haven’t arrived there yet (she famously describes Calabasas where they live as the “Jersey Shore of L.A.”), and children Bridget (Kerris Dorsey) and Conor (Devon Bagby) are somewhat strained (though he seems closer to Bridget than his son) and not quite the Norman Rockwell idyll.
Not surprisingly the man never smiles.
Well, almost never.
Quite a way into the first episode he does finally crack a smile of sorts, but it’s not exactly a carefree Pollyanna in a field of flowers moment.
But at least it’s there.
And along with his concern for the welfare of a former Disney child star, who he is initially asked to tail by another client with whom she’s having an affair, and his obvious affection for his brothers with whom he is tightly boned in stark contrast to the frayed to non-existent bonds with his father, and his fierce if not ideally expressed love for his family, humanise Ray Donovan to a pleasing degree.
I am not entirely sure he’s the kind of person you would want to spend a great deal of time with, since the conversation would be patchy at best and the laughs few and far between – one of his new clients, a star with a runaway mouth, observes that Ray “doesn’t talk much”- but it’s obvious he has a strong moral code and does the right thing by the people he cares about (which includes his boss and mentor, Ezra Goldman played with inimitable style by Elliott Gould).
And takes baseball bats to those he does not such as the stalker who is making life miserable for the ex-child star, with whom he has an uncharacteristically chosen very brief tryst while driving her home (it’s a humanising chink in the armour for a man who up to that point has been the very measure of steely-eyed control).
Or his father whom he frames for a crime in an effort to get him away from his family, both old and new (and its his wife Abby, who has never met Mickey, who lets him back into their lives, ignoring a warning from Ray never to do so).
Ray, who is all taciturn expressions, and grim purpose, is actually likeable, quite an achievement when so much of the world he inhabits has given him cause to wrap a million layers around him to keep out the hurt, and let very little of any substance out.
And that in turn makes the show Ray Donovan, which moves at a brisk pace as our eponymous anti-hero fixes up his clients’ problems with a calm, ruthless efficiency, and which has its rare moments of lightness and humour (such as they are), a likeable show, one with very real possibility.
I certainly liked it enough to contemplate another trip or eight into the depths of my DVR, and if that’s not a vote of confidence in a show, I don’t know what is.
Ray Donovan returns for season 2 in 2014.