So Why Aren't You Watching Damages?

L to R: Andrew McPherson / FX; Mark Seliger / FX FX’s dark, suspenseful series has plotlines as complex as Lost, writing worthy of Mad Men, and a cast that includes Glenn Close, William Hurt, and Marcia Gay Harden. Justin Ravitz argues that all it needs now is an audience.

Among the many mysteries embedded in the addictive, Mobius-strip narrative of Damages: Why hasn’t it generated a cult following as obsessive and vocal as the likes of Mad Men and The Sopranos before it? With a reinvented, always-revelatory Glenn Close at its helm, the FX drama couldn’t be timelier, homing in on pandemic corporate corruption and its terrifying enemy: a zealous, egomaniacal attorney (Close) with a fractured psyche, a bitter, overworked underling, and a city full of enemies.

There are difficult bosses, and then there’s Close’s titanium-boned Patty Hewes, the rageaholic, corruption-busting NYC litigator of Damages. Her handpicked second-year associate Ellen Parsons (the deceptively delicate Rose Byrne) struggles to punch in at the office, and it’s not just the 70-hour work week or Patty’s fire-and-ice, no-boundaries management style—in season one, Patty may have tried to have Ellen murdered. She definitely hired Ellen under false pretenses and killed her fiancé’s sister’s dog, all for a case against pension-stealing CEO Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), whose goons successfully murdered Ellen’s fiancé, a brutal crime for which Ellen was briefly charged. Devil Wears Prada, this is not.

“If you do a scene with Glenn Close, you don’t want to be the idiot who doesn’t know his lines.”

The tightly, elaborately coiled series, in fact, hews as closely to the flashback/forward mindscrews of Lost (without the supernatural) and Jacobean revenge tragedies as it does to crime and legal procedurals. Particularly in season two, which concludes Wednesday, Damages’ crackling, darkly comic, psychoanalyst-fodder dialogue suits a distinguished cast which now includes William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden and alumni of The Wire. Close—a five-time Oscar nominee, never a winner—has made the role of Patty as indelible as the deeply human monsters of Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons.

If you’re just catching up now, here’s the CliffsNotes guide to Damages:

In this season, Ellen is still in Patty’s employ, secretly colluding with FBI agents to bring down Patty, and still hoping to snag Danson’s character. Patty’s firm, meanwhile, takes on a case Erin Brockovich would love: UNR, a global energy behemoth, primping for a merger, covers up a toxic killer, stages brownouts, manipulates stock prices (via a cocaine- and hooker-loving analyst and a Cadillac) while the wife of a hired scientist (Hurt) turns up dead; that moody scientist also happens to be Patty’s ex. By last week’s penultimate episode, a newly vulnerable Patty has shown signs of maternal affection toward Ellen, Ellen’s duplicitous new boyfriend Wes (Timothy Olyphant) has to kill her, and UNR’s jerky CEO Walter Kendrick (John Doman of The Wire) has outwitted his lead counsel Claire Maddox (Harden). And then there’s that flash-forward scene that has been replayed, shuffled and elaborated upon throughout the entire season: Ellen, swigging whiskey, waves a gun in Patty’s face (or someone else’s?) in a hotel room; Patty eventually stumbles out, bloodied.

So…what gives? The Daily Beast interviewed some of the show’s cast and crew, all stoically refused to divulge any spoilers about the finale and its probability of wrapping up so many labyrinthine plot threads.

The show’s creators are Daniel Zelman and brothers Todd and Glenn Kessler, known collectively as KZK, all with experience as writers, directors and producers. (Todd A. Kessler wrote several episodes of The Sopranos, and that show’s brutal beauty is apparent here.) KZK were once young, would-be protégés under the thumb of “powerful, twisted people” in the entertainment industry, Zelman said. “All the ideals you were taught in college aren’t what runs the world or what motivates people.” Their interest in writing about the evolving dynamic between a female boss and an underling (“men in power had been explored a lot”) led to the law, which by nature dips into a wide array of other arenas.

Patty’s character is an amalgamation of real-life figures, including David Boies, an omnipotent, helicopter-traveling attorney who once deposed Bill Gates in an antitrust lawsuit and defended Al Gore versus the Supreme Court in the 2000 Florida election debacle. (John Doman, as the down-and-dirty UNR CEO, said that his character is “inspired by a real person, which I won’t get into. I don’t want [KZK] to get sued.”) While KZK didn’t specifically have Glenn Close in mind when they pitched the show, script-less, to FX, the network suggested the actress, who had just ended a fruitful season on The Shield. The team wrote the pilot imagining Close-as-Patty, and she quickly signed on. “There was never any discussion of any other actor,” Zelman said.

Although the show, built essentially around the Patty-Ellen relationship, isn’t “ripped from the headlines” in the style of the Law & Order franchise, “there are so many articles relevant to our show daily—another episode of corruption here, another executive hanging himself there,” Zelman said. The breakdown of corporate culture and the veritable castration of crooked executives in the real world, Todd Kessler conjectures, is part of Damages’ timely appeal. “There is fascination worldwide with what corruption actually is. And here’s an American show where corruption is front and center.”