Glenn Close But Yet So Far: Spooky Legal Thriller "Damages" (Rose Byrne Also Dwelleth Here)

Also, rage. The rage moments are just fantastic.

just got to close smashing glass and screaming at husband to get out. she kicks ass.

s2 is definitely not as gripping or interesting as s1 but i guess that was inevitable considering how emotionally wrought the first season was.

Anyway,

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Is everyone else as excited as I am?

Jan 25, motherfuckers.

Also, some cast additions:

Lily Tomlin (Marilyn Tobin)
Martin Short (Leonard Winstone)
Keith Carradine (Julian Decker)
Reiko Aylesworth (Rachel Tobin))
Sarah Wynter (Danielle Marchetti)

Fuck yeah, I'm excited.

Just finished watching last two episodes of S2 last night, really looking forward to 3! All through watching these, I wasn't paying attention to credits (lol bittorrent) and kept thinking, "Is that creepy guy Darrell Hammond from SNL? No, it can't be. But it is, right? No. Yes!"

Sitting there w/Ellen all that time after getting gut-stabbed = HARDCORE.

Ehh, s1 was awesome but s2 pretty much sucked. Won't be rejoining it, I don't think.

I love the conceit behind this show but fell behind on season 2.

S2 was amazing

anyway, it's ON TONIGHT

feel like i need to be on this.

rose byrne is such a doll

yes. gorgeous, perfect, goddess, etc.

i keep hearing that S2 wasn't good, but it was.

CO=SIGN ON THAT SHIT.

haven't seen martin short since three amigos, but he's certainly delivering on the promise of that film.

i liked s2! not as much as s1 but danson was great.

lily tomlin looks really good! even if heavily botoxed/made up.

tomlin is such a weird choice for that role

first two episodes show promise tho

I can't wait to start watching this. Can't now cause we're already doing Homicide and Oz.

tomlin is such a weird choice for that role

― max, Saturday, January 30, 2010 1:29 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

ya... keep expecting her to turn kooky. but i don't think she's a bad choice.

Still best show on television. I was a little worried in the beginning, but there's some great stuff going on. I liked how they turned the Madoff thing into a family psychodrama, and I also loved the totemic use of items on the show -- how the purse passes back and forth between time and to a lesser extent the phone number passes from hand to hand. Also Keith Carradine looking really skeevy and creepy. Martin Short I'm meh on so far, but I think Lily Tomlin is kinda great.

2nd episode was *amazing*

I really like how it's a little ambiguous on exactly how complicit or evil Martin Short's character is so far, one of the kinds of things this show excels at. Campbell Scott's character is having a quick descent into hell already, which is great.

Woah. New episode was amazing.

Once again the bizarre title for this week's episode is a home run - "Don't Throw That at the Chicken".

That scene with Short making faces at the video cameras was a great mixture of humorous and creepy. All the actors are continuing to bring their A-game, though this was a pretty slow episode compared to the last couple. Tom Noonan as the detective interviewing Patty is weirder than ever, I love it. Also liked the line from Ellen, "Of course he is! You always mentioned how you're such a bad mother!" followed by an "OK that one was too far" awkward silence.

That scene with Short making faces at the video cameras was a great mixture of humorous and creepy.

omg next level

the one where they were trying to get the chick to the airport was great. no flashforwards, oddly

yeah was wondering why no flash forward in that episode

missed tom noonan :(

i watched the first seasons on dvd over about two days apiece so am feeling it's not fast enough atm

+ they shd bring back olyphant, he's always good value

He's on Justified so I doubt he's coming back... I figured they'd get back to the whole Frobisher plotline at some point before the end of the series, but the ratings are so bad, this is probably the final season.

rly? that sucks

Yeah, the ratings have always been pretty bad but they've only gotten worse every season. I mean, this is getting beaten by the Kardashians show and Pawn Stars on the History Channel - Damages gets about 25% of the viewers of those shows. Thanks, America! I'm definitely glad they signed up everybody for two years after the first season, otherwise it never would've gotten this far.

gd u america, this show owns. keep it going.

i can kind of see that this is not a show that grabs you by the nuts straight off, and it requires some memory n whatnot. but so does lost.

i blame fox's marketing people. if you can't market significant rose byrne screentime you can't market, period.

i dont think its that complex compared to other 00s narrative tv really. its not as layered or as wide-ranging as lots of cable shows really the structure of s1 felt awkward more than confusing putting the main story in flashbacks didnt really add much and the stuff in the present was ugly and broke the flow of the story.

i still liked it but havent watched any of the other seasons.

I genuinely love this show but stopped watching after S1 because I completely forgot it was gone. I really like the title of this thread btw, I laughed out loud in real life and everything.

havent watched any of the other seasons.

stopped watching after S1

if this show gets cancelled it's YOUR FAULT.

there is a curious agreement about season 1 here
now that i am watching this show it will probably get axed
rose byrne should maybe eat a hamburger once in a while, beautiful gal but lollipop head syndrome nagl

she is hideously skinny.

I finally caught up to the latest episode. I think I like this season more than season 2. It's weird, though... this season's story seems less grandiose, as far as the main characters are concerned - like it's more about the case than it is about Ellen vs. Patty - yet they are killing off a key main character.

I think maybe the main problem with this show is that it's too dumb for people looking for a legal equivalent to The Wire, but too dark, complicated, and subtle, for like, people who watch NCIS or whatever. Like, I have a feeling my lawyer friends would scoff at this show the way scientists probably laugh at Fringe.

one thing that amuses/annoys me about this show is that they don't even seem like they practice law. it might as well be a detective agency. Like, you never see straight-out-of-law-school Ellen plugging away at her desk, and on her laptop, until 10:30pm every night. I think she wrote one brief in three seasons. I try to just imagine they are doing that shit on the side and that it would be boring to show, but damn... especially with the straight out of law school chick trying to prove herself, you'd think she would have less spare time.

I don't think too dumb compared to the The Wire is really appropriate at all, since this show isn't even trying to be so "realistic" or in the same genre - this show is a character-based mystery thriller. Damages is actually quite smart, particularly in its storytelling via character dynamics - making you constantly wondering what every character is after, how they're all related/communicating/lying to each other - I can't think of any other show on the air that's as good or superbly acted. Damages just isn't going to appeal to people who can't keep track and pick up all the nuances of these relationships - most continuity-heavy shows more heavily rely on plot for this sort of hook instead. The flashforward structures are also pretty effective on the whole, I think only Lost even tries anything as interesting on a season-long basis.

People could totally go for this show if they gave it a chance, but Damages has always been totally mismarketed ("Live the lifestyle of Patty Hewes! By Cadillac!") and probably isn't helped by completely dissimilar programming on the channel, like Nip/Tuck or Rescue Me or the 297th airing of Fantastic Four. (Though perhaps Sons of Anarchy or Justified are slightly closer in spirit?) Maybe because it's such a female-dominated show that's not your typical Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives type soap.

I do agree though that, surprisingly, the whole Tobin family drama is better than last year's William Hurt/family drama, since the concept seemed pretty thin at first, but the acting as usual has really made it work. Not that I wasn't pretty amused by Kevin Corrigan last year, but just compare that to how entertaining Martin Short's brief character scenes are in every episode this year. You're totally right about how it seems less grandiose, despite the stakes being much higher all around.

I vaguely remember in the first season there were a lot more scenes of Ellen telling her fiance/family members that she was too busy to ever see them since she was working late in the office - I think we've seen enough of those scenes in this show to be safely assumed at this point that all these people are busy all the time doing boring clerical work. Court appearances and so on work pretty minimally into the plot, which I think is a good choice for this show.

Still kinda sad that this is likely gonna be it - only three episodes left, and I doubt they're going to get a renewal or really wrap up the Frobisher storyline for good.

god that was a long post, my apologies

I don't mean to slag the show by being all, "it's dumber than the Wire" or anything... I just meant that maybe that's one reason why this show hasn't tapped into that 'don't watch anything but intelligent cable dramas' crowd that seem to support shows like Breaking Bad.

No, it was a good post - not too long at all! I don't have time to respond to all of it, but I'll try to get on later. I agree with most of your points anyway, though. It's sad to hear that this show is probably dying.

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Apparently DirecTV might try to pick up the show and share half the costs with FX, the way they did with Friday Night Lights. I hope they do, as I really do not want this to be the last season.

I don't know a single person who has kept up with Friday Night Lights since they did that, but at least it is still on the air, I guess.

Just realized that the Antiguan crook is Brother Mouzone from The Wire. Mind blown.

1/2 of the cast are wire alums

Turns out Lily Tomlin is one cold-blooded character, huh? That scene w/her and Campbell Scott was great.

i had a feeling they had something good cooking for her, since she was pretty important in the first few episodes and then disappeared for a while

Also, I literally LOLed when they were doing the table read for the Frobisher movie and the dude started doing the Zeljko Ivanek drawl. That was amazing.

I'm so behind on this season.

Argh, S2 so frustrating but still good enough to keep watching. Glad they brought back Danson, he is so great in this.

Wish they'd given my boy Tim-O some decent shit to do

S3 is better, and very addictive, but at the same time it's so frustrated how written-on-the-fly the show feels sometimes, like plot twists that make NO SENSE just for the sake of a plot twist, e.g.

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Tobin's daughter is really his son's daughter, but Tobin's wife kept it from his son all these years because he was "messed up back then" or something. WTF, what wife would pretend that her husband had a daughter through an affair in order to prevent her son from thinking HE had had a daughter?

Finally finished the series after all these years. Even seasons (2/4) kinda sucked, Star Trek movie-style, the odd seasons were all good (1/3/5). Overall worth it though, season 5 especially came around in the second half with all the callbacks and wrap-ups from earlier seasons, especially to the first and best season. Even when this show slogged, I still admired their commitment to their various themes (PTSD, evil parentings, wonderful rainbows of moral shade) and they generally pulled it off really well even when the plots and flash-foward fakeouts would get too ridiculous.

Last night's episode was like some bad 90s movie with like, hacker keyboard battles and shit. What is this. So sad, this was really one of my favorite shows.

xp lol I loved all that absurd Tobin crap

Loved season one, liked the parts of season 2 that weren't dependent on the alleged sexual magnetism of William Hurt, liked season 3 until the big "here's what happened" finale (forget why but felt more contrived than necessary), gonna start 4 eventually

didn't realize there was a fifth season. guess i've got more summer watching now.

loved the first 2 seasons, still wanna see the other 3, need to see if they're on netflix or amazon prime or if i need to get the dvds or something.

they're all streaming on Netflix right now