Military TV, Television - Military Times

FX’s legal thriller ‘Damages’ returns in all its complexity

Legal thriller “Damages” returns to FX Wednesday (10 ET/PT) unbowed by its complex, time-bending plots.

There were the great reviews. The twin Emmys for star Glenn Close as crafty lawyer Patty Hewes and Zeljko Ivanek’s Ray Fiske, the adversary who shot himself in the head in front of her. A two-year renewal. And a network thrilled to have a worthy replacement for its just-ended first original series, “The Shield.”

“It took six or seven years of development to find a legal show we thought was good enough to fit the FX brand,” says channel chief John Landgraf. “‘Damages’ has become as critically acclaimed as ‘The Shield’ ever was.”

The shocker in last season’s finale was that Patty, traumatized by Fiske’s suicide, was revealed as the culprit behind the unsuccessful hit on her protégée, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne). Now Ellen is working as an FBI informant to bring down Patty while aiming for revenge on last year’s bad guy, Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), responsible for the death of her fiancé.

Danson is back for several episodes. (The shotgun blast to his chest proved non-fatal.) But the main action shifts to Patty’s defense of Daniel Purcell, an energy researcher played by William Hurt.

“Patty, for all her complications, doesn’t like bullies,” Close says. “Ultimately that’s what’s so compelling about the character. Patty is not always manipulative; for the most part, she’s on the side of doing good.”

“Damages” has yet to become a hit. Last season’s premiere, in mid-2007, averaged 2.5 million viewers (rising to 4.4 million with weekly repeats counted), which Landgraf concedes is “middling” by FX standards.

One reason may be those dense plots and frequent time shifts. “Some people said it got really complex, and if you weren’t totally up-to-date with everything, it was hard to keep up,” Close says. “Thank God for boxed sets (and) marathon reruns.”

Producer Daniel Zelman says the show “is always going to be complicated.” But the new episodes are more streamlined, with more episodes featuring self-contained events. “The idea was to try to make all of them simpler,” he says.

But only to a point. “The reason the show is so good is that it’s devilishly clever and uniquely plotted,” Landgraf says. If, in searching for a broader audience, “you turn the show into every week, Patty Hewes gets her man, you’d have destroyed it. We weren’t about to dismantle what’s great about the show to retool it.”