Oh, the drama.
There we were, standing with Don Draper in his moment of purging on the penultimate season finale of Mad Men.
Daughter Sally in tow, he gazed at the dilapidated corner whorehouse and proclaimed that was where he grew up. It was a fitting climax to Don’s downward spiral that has marked an outstanding season of adult drama.
The look of astonishment and realization on Sally’s face was brilliant television. Really good stuff.
But it also reminded us of the void the Mad Men season ending leaves. After all, it won’t be until Aug. 11 when Bryan Cranston’s Walter White arrives with the final episodes of Breaking Bad to rescue us from our summer addiction to Big Brother.
(Yes. Big Brother is my annual guilty pleasure and this season we have a Conway resident to cheer for. More about that in Tuesday’s column.)
To the rescue rides Showtime with Ray Donovan. Do not let this one fly under your radar if you love nuanced, satisfying, adult drama.
The series stars Liev Schreiber in the title role, along with Jon Voight. It debuts at 9 p.m. today.
Schreiber’s Ray is a laconic professional Hollywood “fixer” - one of those guys hired by the rich and famous to take care of people and things that need, for lack of a better word, fixing.
Sometimes messy situations are fixed with muscle and intimidation. Sometimes with persuasion and coercion. Sometimes with guile and deceit.
But Ray can’t fix everything, especially when it comes to his hard-core Irish-Catholic South Boston family. And especially with his father, Mickey, played with delightful - and occasionally sinister - depth by Voight.
Much of the preseason hype has compared Ray Donovan to The Sopranos. We have the same intense, conflicted anti-hero struggling to create a calm center in his otherwise chaotic life. Ray is doing his best to put distance between the Donovans’ previous rough life in Boston and the better (is it better?) life in the Los Angles suburbs.
And just as with The Sopranos, this series contains enough humorous moments to leaven the seriousness.
Ray also has two brothers. Terry (Eddie Marsan) is a decent, shy, former boxer with Parkinson’s disease who runs the family gym. The youngest, Bunchy (Dash Mihok), battles his demons of alcohol and cocaine and blames it all on being molested as an altar boy.
Oh, yeah. For added measure there’s a newly revealed biracial half-brother, Daryll, played by Pooch Hall.
The action begins when old-school thug Mickey unexpectedly gets released from prison. The first thing he does is brutally execute the priest he believed molested Bunchy. That it turns out he whacked the wrong guy doesn’t faze him.
Then Mickey heads to Los Angeles to reconnect with his family. His daughter-in-law Abby, played by Deadwood’s Paula Malcomson, is initially reticent about Mickey, but his grandkids (Devon Bagby and Kerris Dorsey) are delighted to have him in their lives.
Mickey’s arrival turns Ray’s world upside down. Let the drama begin.
It’s good to see Elliott Gould back on the small screen as one of Ray’s employers. Peter Jacobson from House is another.
Rounding out the ensemble as Ray’s highly competent associates in the fixing business are Lena (Katherine Moennig, The L Word), a nails-tough lesbian who handles the office and research, and Steven Bauer (Scarface) as Avi, Ray’s Israeli muscle and right-hand man.
Tonight’s messes that need to be fixed are a closeted gay Hollywood action hero who is blackmailed after soliciting a transsexual prostitute, and a star athlete who wakes up to find a dead woman in his bed. Ray kills two birds with one stone.
Needless to remind you, the series is rated TV-MA for all the usual reasons.
Dexter denouement. Warm up for the debut of Ray Donovan with the first episode of Season 8 - the final season - of Dexter at 8 p.m. today on Showtime.
It promises to be an interesting final 12 episodes for our favorite serial killer. Key to this season’s action is that Dexter (Michael C. Hall) will meet Dr. Evelyn Vogel (British actress Charlotte Rampling), the neuropsychiatrist who helped Dexter’s father invent “The Code” that he used to control Dexter’s murderous impulses.
The Code allows Dexter to kill only the people who deserve it. And many, many have deserved it over seven seasons.
“The final season is about a sense of legacy,” Hall says in a Showtime interview. “This season picks up about six months later. We find Dexter telling himself that things are good, but there are a lot of problems. The subterranean stuff is starting to bubble up.”
That subterranean stuff involves his sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), who now knows Dexter’s sanguinary secret.
Hall adds, “I have no idea how fans will react. Hopefully they’ll be compelled by the story.” The TV Column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. E-mail:
Style, Pages 46 on 06/30/2013