I’ve got a new obsession.
It’s called Damages, and it’s a new TV show on the FX Channel.
This is my public service announcement: You gotta watch this show.
The narrative stream runs jaggedly from one time and place to another.The pilot episode opens with a bloody, frightened woman running through the streets of New York in broad daylight. As she is brought in to the police department, she refuses to give even the slightest piece of information about herself, not even her name. She only asks for a lawyer. We then return to six months prior, when we first meet this girl (Ellen, played by Rose Byrnes) as she lands her dream job with the most feared and detested high-profile litigator in the country, Patty Hewes (played by the great Glenn Close). Patty’s firm, Hewes & Associates, is launching a class action civil suit against Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), a CEO who just sank all his employees’ stock and got away scot-free from the government. We realize that Patty is exceptionally manipulative, and will stop at nothing to win. The pilot ends with a shocking revelation of a tragic crime committed, which occurs at the time of our initial scene, and the whole rest of the season works its way up to that moment, revealing little bits of truth along the way.
I knew I was hooked when it is revealed, near the end of the pilot episode, that Patty was actually the one who had orchestrated the carrying out of a particularly heinous deed that shocked us all earlier in the episode. Standing on a pier, she tosses the only piece of evidence connecting her to that crime into the ocean. Later, in the final shot, and once we realize that we are in for some massive scheming, double crossing, and general chaos all around in the next several weeks, we see a grainy shot of that pier jutting out into that suddenly-frightening ocean. As we stared at the ocean, knowing what just transpired there, we here the sounds of the White Stripes, “I Think I Smell a Rat.”
Now that’s good television.
The truth in Damages unfolds piece by piece; and so we all get to play lawyer as we move toward finding out how the crime in the pilot episode played out. The discovery process is fascinating, and you recover the sense of excitement you get with unfulfilled speculation: Could Patty really be capable of that? Or was it Frobisher? Surely not Ellen! And so on.
The show deals with existential issues, but never in an obligatory fashion. In the third episode, Patty and her husband get called into the school therapist’s office to discuss her son’s pranks unruly behavior. The therapist informs her that, though her son’s behavior obviously bothers him, what interests him even more is the son’s dreams. One that the son shared with the therapist had him standing on the front porch, watching eight limosines pull up, and eight copies of himself climbing out of the cars. An assassin is waiting to kill the real him, and he cannot figure out which is it is. Patty clearly frustrated at recognizing her own dream being used by him, and even more frustrated when the therapist says he interprets it as revealing the son’s irrational anxiety and inability to perform daily routines, to which the son adds, “…and my paralyzing fear of death.” “Right,” the therapist says. “And his paralyzing fear of death.”
Evil characters abound, and it is clear which ones we’ll pretty much root for. But the creators of Damages simply won’t let us write off even the worst characters as beyond real human emotions. You know the turns the bad guys take in regular shows, where they decide to do something unbelievably evil? In this show, because of their protesting, those turns become so incredibly believable. And that’s the beauty of the show: evil and goodness reside within the same human body, as well as the possibilities for both. And we can never assume that we are too firmly planted on that good side. As Patty remarks in the third episode, after having received a few death threats, it is dangerous to take power from the powerful. Or security from the secure, for that matter. The show leaves us with a troubling question: How far would I go to protect myself, my family, my ambitions? Who would I be willing to become?
When you start asking yourself that, you know you’ve got must-see TV
Here’s a preview for ya’ll, free of charge.
