Ray Donovan Season 5

What the actual fuck happened to this show?

Seasons 1 and 2 were brilliant. I’d been aware of Liev Schreiber but his portrayal of Ray was a revelation. The relationships between the brothers and Mickey (Jon Voight) and Mickey’s criminal past threw off endless subplots that complemented the main stories, which were themselves artfully constructed examples of Ray using one client’s problem to solve another’s with everyone coming out ahead. (At least as far as Ray’s clients were concerned. Everyone else was on their own.) Watching Ray’s relationship with Ezra (Elliott Gould) as Mickey came back into the picture was engrossing.

Then Ann Biderman left the show, replaced by David Hollander.

(Editor’s Note: Spoilers don’t just abound from here on out. That’s pretty much all that follows. Consider it a warning or a public service message. Your choice.)

Things didn’t collapse in Seasons 3 and 4. They eroded into Season 5, which is a hot mess of what Ray Donovan might look like if it were a Lifetime movie that decided to re-imagine The French Lieutenant’s Woman over a span of twelve weeks instead of two hours. (And two hours of that was more than enough.)

Most of the first two-thirds of Seasons 5 teases about how Ray’s wife Abby (Paula Malcomson) died. First it appears she recovered from cancer, then symptoms pop up at unexpected time just as she and Ray are reconnecting. We see this through a series of lengthy flashbacks that serve the dual purpose of not only killing the story’s momentum, but confusing time frames and references beyond all recognition. The “Previously on Ray Donovan” teases last several minutes in a valiant effort to refresh your memory on what happened several weeks ago, when last this subplot appeared.

Characters doing things that weren’t really in character if the writers needed something to move the plot has always hampered the Hollander era. Season 5 uses this weakness as a foundation. Both Terry (Ray Marsan) and Bridget (Kerris Dorsey) tell people things that can serve no earthly good except to create conflict. Bunchy (Dash Mihok) does things so stupid he barely qualifies as a sentient being. Given any choice, he inevitably makes the one calculated to do the most damage.

Two weak spots really tore the season apart. Bunchy, distraught because the diaper bag he was carrying $1.2 million in was stolen in a robbery he just happened to wander into (I swear to God I did not make that up), arrives drunk to pick up baby Maria from day care, so Mickey has to do it. Bunchy gets arrested and Mickey gets sidetracked, so no one picks up Maria the next day. We see the say care provider making a phone call, but no one answers.

And that’s the end of it. After having made a point of showing this predicament, the writers drop it. We don’t see the baby again for at least four episodes, when mother Teresa (Alyssa Diaz) is seen holding her after returning from several weeks on the road with a professional wrestling troupe. (ISTGIDNMTU, either.) Since Ray gets a call when anyone else gets a hangnail, it’s hard to believe he wasn’t on the emergency list, except that it would have been inconvenient for the writers if Ray found out what Bunchy and Mickey were up to just then. Another subplot that suggests itself would be for the day care center to call Child Protective Services, but that never happens, either. The kid just disappears.

Where the show jumps the shahk (as Ray would say), is in what we discover Ray did to get Abby into a surgical trial she was originally denied. He:

1. Gets Lena (Katherine Moenning, woefully underused) to find out everything there is to know about the three people who got the spots Abby didn’t. This takes Lena what appears to be no more than a couple of hours, never mind medical privacy and computer security systems. She’s good, but the only person in the world who’s that good is the goofy chick on NCIS.
2. While Lena does this, Ray hooks up with Avi (Steven Bauer) who sets him up with a Mossad agent working deep undercover in New York who just happens to be able to provide
3. A vial of meningitis bacteria that Ray has to take by force because Avi got arrested for heroin possession 38 seconds after getting off the plane in New York
4. After which Ray sneaks into a hospital wearing a bloody shirt and multiple lacerations and contusions (I’d call them cuts and bruises but we’re in a hospital) to
5. Inject the meningitis into the IV of the kid Ray wants to knock out of the trial, assuming Abby is the first alternate.

Had enough? As they say in commercials, “But wait! There’s more!

After learning Bridget has fallen in love with the kid he aced out of the trial and learning she hates him and does something so dumb (and unlikely) I’m not even going to waste time on it here (except for when she’s in jail and needs Ray to get her out), Ray finds a conscience and

1. Arranges with the Hollywood mogul he’s working for to force the doctor Bridget pulled a gun on to do the operation anyway (See? I don’t you it wasn’t worth going into)
2. In a special secret operating theater stuffed into a strip mall in New York City, because this is entirely out of protocol for the trial and people will go to jail if word gets out (how a Hollywood mogul has the juice to do this is just assumed)
3. Where the operation goes well. The doctor releases the kid to Terry and Bridget for a few days of home care—and here’s a list of the meds he’ll need, no prescriptions—after brain surgery.

Rest assured that’s only about half of the glaring plot holes and confusions in Season 5, but I already had to sit through it once. I’m done here.

Ray Donovan, Season Four

 This isn’t my first blog post about Ray Donovan. I loved Season One and liked Season Two almost as much. Season Three I didn’t say anything about, mainly because it wasn’t as good. Season Four is a half notch down again. I see a pattern developing.

The show has always lived on the edge. Ann Biderman created a fascinating anti-hero, a sociopath with a conscience. (Yes, I know that’s an oxymoron. Watch the show and see if you don’t agree with me.) Ray had a knack for creative solutions, often using one problem to solve another and getting what each client wants, though maybe not in the manner expected. Or hoped for. Too bad. What a lot of powerful people forget about someone like Ray is that once you ask him to get you out of trouble, he has something on you. Ray has a code, so your secret is safe. Unless you fuck with him.

The show rides on the backs of the Donovan boys: Ray (Liev Schreiber, who has become

one of my favorite actors), Terry (Eddie Marsan), Bunchy (Dash Mihok), and the anti-matter to their matter, father Mickey (Jon Voight). Seasons One and Two played on the dynamics between them, exacerbated by Mickey’s criminal history and the brothers’ problems with a pedophile priest. Ray’s business associates Avi (Stephen Bauer) and Lena (Katherine Moenning) were devoted to Ray for reasons never explained but understood, and he stood by them. His family—wife Abby (Paula Malcolmson), daughter Bridget (Kerris Dorsey), and son Conor (Devon Bagby) exist mainly to break Ray’s balls, as if he doesn’t have enough going on already.

Seasons One and Two worked because there was a line to how crazy things got. Ray always found a clever way out before things overwhelmed him altogether, and the solution never strained one’s suspension of disbelief.

Then Biderman left the show. I can’t find anything that said she was forced out—though she did appear to run over budget based on one account—and I did get the impression from interviews she prefers getting a project off the ground to keeping it running. For whatever reason, she left. And took her vision with her.

I’m big on vision in creative projects. As an old boss used to say, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Biderman knew where she was going, and she knew how to get there. She had a gift for creative, multi-tiered solutions to Ray’s problems. Combining that with the interplay between the Donovan men made the first two seasons fascinating television I’ll definitely watch again.

Biderman’s replacement—I could look up his name, but don’t feel like it—lacks her gift for the clever solution, and doesn’t appear to understand how best to leverage the Donovan family dynamic. His solution is to keep creating more outrageous situations with solutions that require brute force more than wit. The best thing about Season Four was promoting Mickey’s son by a different mother, Daryll (Pooch Hall) into a more interesting part. Terry doesn’t do much more than run the gym, and Bunchy’s story has become a soap opera. Abby got breast cancer early in the season and made a miraculous recovery; Bunchy’s wife Teresa (Alyssa Diaz) comes down with post-partum depression and snaps out of it just in time to resolve a crisis. So, meh.

The worst failing in Season Four is Ray. He recovers from the wounds at the end of Season Four and takes six months to stop drinking and looking to live a better life. First problem he finds, and boom!! He’s worse than ever. He’s always asked Avi and Lena for extraordinary devotion, but they knew, no matter how much he broke their balls, he had their backs, and they owed him. In Season Four he’s become a prick with them, too, hanging them out to dry until Avi find himself in a situation—thanks to Ray—he can’t get out of. Ray comes through, but things have reached a point where one has to wonder what it is he did for Avi and Lena to inspire this level of devotion.

With all this in mind, will I watch Season Five when it’s ready? Damn right. Schreiber as Ray

is too compelling to miss. His performance here got me to looking him up elsewhere and I’ve yet to find anything he doesn’t do well. (Examples: Spotlight, Pawn Sacrifice, Defiance, Goon. Yes, Goon. You don’t think he was good in Goon, I will lay you the fuck out.) The show’s worth watching just to see him and Jon Voight go at it. (And the other brothers, too, when the writers give them something worthwhile to do.) But the other reasons to watch get thinner by the year.

Understanding Art

Benoit Lelieve is one of the people who keeps me from getting old. While he’s young enough to be my son—okay, my nephew, maybe—his blog Dead End Follies routinely provides fodder that keeps me looking at things in a fresh light and exposes me to others I might otherwise have missed. While his tastes and interest are not always my own (see the age difference comment above), his writing on more universal issues, filtered through our dissimilar backgrounds, is always thought-provoking. This isn’t the first time he’s stimulated a response that required more thought and space than could fit into a comment, and it will not be the last.

A few weeks ago he wrote about the difficulty of understanding art. (Pause inserted while you read his piece, which would be worth reading even if it weren’t helpful for understanding what I wrote below.) As with all such discussions, the crux of the matter is defining what art is, as it’s impossible to understand anything if one can’t define it. Therein lies the rub. Art is like beauty (and, not coincidentally, often has “beauty” somewhere in many of its definitions) in that it is in the eye of the beholder. What is art to me may not be art to you, and the guy down street agrees with neither of us, though he’s a cretin, so fuck him.

Does intent matter? Maybe. Probably not. J.S. Bach didn’t intend for his cantatas to become timeless works of art. He just needed music for Sunday’s service. On the flip side are countless writers, singers, songwriters, actors, sculptors, painters, on and on with pretentions of creating art. Their definition of art is sometimes whatever they create and, oh my god, is this a “my shit doesn’t stink” crew to have to deal with. So, no, intent doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Another question that comes up—often raised by snobs—is whether art is more “noble” than entertainment. Even if that’s true—a point on which I am not sure—there’s also no bright line there. Doesn’t art need to entertain its audience on some level? Since its medium (listening, viewing, reading) is not required for life—and by “required” I mean like food and water and air—can’t we say there must be some reason for people other than the creator to partake, and that reason is to be entertained? Devotees of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are likely not entertained by his writing in the same way as Bruce Springsteen’s fans are by the Boss’s work, but each has qualities in their creations that engage others, and we can think of that engagement as entertainment as easily as anything else.

Now, there is entertainment and there is entertainment. “Mere” entertainment doesn’t challenge the audience. (See Benoit’s comments about the TV show Numb3rs. See? I told you to read his piece.) If one engages with a book or movie or piece of music but is not compelled to think about it afterward as more than a good time, it succeeds as entertainment, but it is not art. Art is when the experience gets one to thinking about more than what was on the surface. I enjoy Ray Donovan, but when each episode is over any discussion focuses on what happened, what went well, and what they might have done better. Compare that to The Wire or Deadwood or NYPD Blue, where The Beloved Spouse and I talk about all of the above and how it affected us. What it made us think about we hadn’t thought of before, and what it made us re-evaluate.

I argue that no one can fully “understand” art. It’s too dependent on one’s previous experience and background. I have friends whose opinions I trust and respect, whose work I enjoy and value, who get moist about the virtues of X-Men or Batman, or any of a number of members of the DC or Marvel universes; I think they’re fucking comic books. That doesn’t make me wrong, nor them. It doesn’t even mean either of us is mistaken. It just shows there’s more each of us may still have to learn, and having more to learn—and a desire to continue to learn it—is always a good thing.

Maybe that’s all we need to understand about art. It’s what makes us want to keep growing.

Ray Donovan, Season Two

(Fair warning: spoilers abound.)

Season Two of Showtime’s Ray Donovan started off strong with Ray going to Mexico to bring back Mickey to account for how exactly Sully turned up dead. Boston Globe reporter Kate McPherson (Vinessa Shaw) stumbles onto a flaw in the Sully story from the other end and has Ray stuck between the feds and her investigation. Lots of threads to pull together and things were rolling. There was immediate chemistry between Ray (Live Schreiber) and Kate. The Beloved Spouse and I were looking forward to seeing how that give and take played out.

Alas, twas not to be. Ray beds Kate early on and the middle part of the season muddles through

as more of a soap opera than the tight drama we’d come to expect. Many of Season One’s problems become even more prominent here. Ray’s wife, Abby (Paula Malcomson) is all over the place. She’s either mentally ill or the writers only use her as a complication for Ray. A similar situation exists for the kids, too. Half the fun of a well-constructed drama is getting to know the characters so we have some idea what they’ll do in a situation. Too often in Ray Donovan the prime consideration seems to be what can be done to give Ray the biggest pain in the ass.

Even Terry (Eddie Marsan) gets into the act. He decides to sell the gym and move to Ireland with Frances (Brooke Smith). His problem is Ray owns half the gym and has been using it to launder his money, which Terry only finds out about when he decides to confront Ray at Conor’s birthday party. This also happens to be when Mickey (Jon Voight) disses Darryl (Pooch Hall) in front of the entire family by giving the vintage Caddy he promised to Darryl to Conor on the spur of the moment. (All this is after Abby forgot the kid’s birthday and fucked up getting him a cake.) Sure it’s great drama and we get a fantastic scene of Conor and Ray in an “Aw, fuck it” moment, but here’s the thing: Terry and Mickey love Conor. It defies their characters to believe they’d pull that shit unprovoked on the kid’s birthday. True, Mickey is a douche who might do some shitty thing at any moment, but not Terry. I never bought the idea that he would force Ray into a corner during the party.

The series found its feet again in the final four episodes, which, not coincidentally, show Ray stepping up to take control of several situations. He resolves them in his own way and set up confrontations for next season with Avi and Ezra along with whatever goofy shit Abby will pull.

The show is still good enough that we’ll be all over Netflix as soon as Season Three is available. Schreiber is perfect as Ray. He’s not quite the match of actor to character as James Gandolfini and Tony Soprano, but he’s close. A sociopath one can empathize with because, deep down, he will do what he feels he has to do for his family and the people he thinks deserve it. He’s willing to

go to prison to save Kate, and may be in the process of bringing down everything he’s worked for to avenge her murder. His resolution to the situation of Bridget witnessing Marvin Gaye Washington’s murder was creative, ballsy, and badass. You can’t help but root for him.

And let’s not forget Bunchy (Dash Mihok). The more you see how his molestation messed with him, the happier you are Ray shot that priest in Season One. Lots of dramas address pedophilia; few look at the victims twenty years later. Bunchy is permanently damaged, an eternal psychological child in a man’s body, doubting everything about himself. He’s painful to watch at times, though his story lines never veer into the dramatic inconsistency of some of the others.

I would give Season One 4.5 stars out of 5. Season Two is at least that good when it’s good, but no more than an episodic network melodrama with foul language and visible nipples when it’s not. Ian McShane joins the cast for Season Three. We have high hopes.

Ray Donovan Season One

(Note: I’m generally able to stay away from spoilers, but I can’t promise it. This review will go where it goes. Consider this fair warning.)

Ray Donovan (Live Schreiber) is a fixer. Think Michael Clayton, unconcerned about some any

legal niceties. Ray’s small company works for big-time Hollywood wheeler-dealer Ezra Goldman (Elliott Gould) doing whatever needs to be done to keep the talent earning. Married basketball players finds a dead girl (not his wife) in his bed? Call Ray. Someone’s about to release a gay video of a big action star? Call Ray. What’s really clever is how Ray folds separate problems into a single solution, and everyone comes out ahead, sometimes including Ray, who is not above picking up the stray bag of money. It’s not stolen—the previous owner knows Ray took it—but sometimes he delivers cash and persuades the recipient there’s a better deal to be had. It’s spent to the person who paid it, and the other guy has decided he’d rather have something else. Ray will give that orphaned money a good home.

He also has a unique way of making his points. Early on he has a stalker dye himself green in his own bathtub. Why? To show Ray can get to him anywhere and at any time, and do whatever he wants. The green thing is Ray’s idea of a little joke. When the stalker—still green—scares hell out of the woman again, Ray beats him to death with a baseball bat. Fun’s fun, but enough’s enough.

The show’s greatest success to getting you to root for a sociopath. Ray does what he wants, and his methods are whatever he thinks will work best at the time. That’s not to say he doesn’t have a heart. He loves his family—though he sometimes has difficulty showing it in ways they can understand—and will go out of his way to make things come out right for a person caught in the middle. He saves his less sympathetic ideas for those who deserve it.

His families are key to understanding his character. He and his wife grew up in South Boston, but their two kids know nothing but LA. Abby (Paula Malcomson, Trixie in Deadwood), us still adjusting after what might be twenty years on the West Coast. Her character is harder to pin down than Ray’s. The Beloved Spouse and I are still trying to decide if Abby is bipolar or if the writers manipulate her mood to get Ray to react how they need him to.

The more compelling family dynamic is Ray’s blood family. Brother Terry (Eddie Marsan) is a washed-up fighter with Parkinson’s who runs a boxing gym in LA. Younger brother Brenden—a/k/a Bunchy (Dash Mihok) was molested by a priest and is an eternal emotional adolescent. Baby sister Bridget killed herself while on drugs back in Boston. We’re never told why all the boys came to LA, but it assumed they came with father figure Ray to get as far away from Boston as possible.

Ray is the father figure because the biological father, Mickey (Jon Voight) is as pluperfect a son of a bitch as has ever been created. Just released from 20 years in prison after being framed by Ray for one of the few crimes he didn’t commit, Mickey’s first act as a free man is to kill the priest who molested Bunchy, except—oops—he kills the priest’s innocent brother. Invited to LA by Abby—who knows nothing of the depth of animosity between Ray and his father—Mickey is more like a spear than a thorn in Ray’s side.

Schreiber was born to play Ray. Understated, yet eternally menacing, genuinely tender with his children. He’s the master of subtle expression and delivery, such as the time Ezra’s partner gets up in his face about how he’s tired of Ray not doing his precise bidding and how maybe he should just fire Ray and get it over with. Ray just gives the guy a flat look and says, very matter-of-fact, “I’m not the kind of guy you fire.”

Marsan is spot on as Terry, and Mihok gives an award-caliber performance as Bunchy, whose first purchase after getting $1.4 million as a settlement from the Church is to buy a bicycle with ape-hanger handle bars. Next he buys a house—a dump—and decorates his room as any ten-year-old would. His character is heartbreaking, never maudlin.

They’re all great, but Voight’s Mickey is the straw that stirs the drink. Schreiber is more than capable of carrying the show, but it’s the bad chemistry between Ray and Mickey that sets Ray Donovan apart. The pressure Mickey’s presence and bad influence has on the three brothers—plus half-brother Darryl, who works out at Terry’s gym—keeps the story constantly on edge. Ray has more than enough on his mind with work, the wife and kids, and his brothers, the man who has had to be strong while no one is strong for him. Mickey is the spinning plate too many.

The show is not without weaknesses. Ray’s overload sometimes seems a bit much, and the time frames in which events occur are not always reasonable. These faults are less overlookable than overwhelmed by the good points. Ray Donovan is a worthy successor to such premium cable giants as The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire. Maybe not quite as routinely excellent, but when it’s good—as it is a large majority of the time—it’s just as good.