Damages Season 2 (2007)

I am a season behind on this, but I watch it like a movie...one episode after the next withing a few days. First, I love the soundtrack...especially the opening song "When I am Through With You," written by Jason Rabe and Ravi Subramanian, performed by VLA. Why do I enjoy a show with a tagline such as "Win at all costs"????? Despite the abundance of plot, I'm in this for the characters, of course.

Created by Daniel Zelman, brothers Glenn and Todd Kessler, the writing production trio had some involvement previously with The Sopranos. No wonder. Here hiigh-power attorney Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) and her protege Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) are central to this story of good against evil, corporate corruption, relationship, power and money....greed. Patty tells Ellen early on "You're a lawyer--get used to lying." Patty is married to investment king, Phil Gray...played by Michael Nouri, who just have been in dozens of made for tv movies on the Lifetime channel as the handsome love interest. Industry pollution, mergers, contrived stock trades, revenge and scandel...it's all so real and unreal.

Arthur Frobischer (Ted Danson) is the likable bad guy with company trouble and a wife out to divorce him. He recovers from being shot and wants to change his ways. He once said things like "Take her out," but transforms through the help of his Deepak Chopra-like personal healer who tells Frobischer "Every gesture has two sides--one faces the sun and one faces the darkness." The two join forces to build a healing arts center on the site where he buries the bullet that nearly did him in.was shot. Charges against him mount. There are hits, makes, FBI and investigators at every turn.

Ellen escapes a murder attempt, but her fiancee does not. Patty is watching Ellen and Ellen is watching Patty. Their partner, family man Tom Shayes is played by Tate Donovan who is known previously on Seinfeld. He finds himself in for more than he ever bargained for. Daniel Purcell (William Hurt), world-weary scientist gone bad, is Patty's former love interest and father of her teenage son. My favorite this season is Claire Maddox (Marcia Gay Harden), attorney for Patty's opposition. The only child of hopeful parents, by mid-life she is the top of her game...one of the boys, but outwardly sexy in her low-cut suits and mile-high heels. She wears stockings and garters, drinks vodka martinis (dirty)....won't let her lover light her post-sex cigarette. "I smoke one at the end of the day and I smoke it alone." She sums up the state of the economy and contemporary life..."There is no one more endangered than the american caucasian male." Independent and childfree, she answers her elderly father's lament about no grandchildren with "If you wanted grandchildren, Dad, you should have had a lot more kids." There are so many more interesting characters, but one really has to start at the beginning of this saga and watch it all unfold.