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.

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.