Glenn Close is hard to dismiss
Hide your bunny rabbits. In FX's new drama "Damages," we get a full serving of the soul-sucking Glenn Close, the hard-boiled and boiling one from "Fatal Attraction," the one who yanked the strings so very tight in "Dangerous Liaisons." As top litigation attorney Patty Hewes, Close is all charming smiles that sit calmly beneath sinister, glinting eyes. Her angular face has Earth Mother potential, a remnant from " The Big Chill" days, but in "Damages" her aspect is as sharp as a stainless steel knife.
And it's always riveting to watch Close play the sly alpha dog, even in a familiar, ripped-from-the-headlines vehicle such as "Damages," which premieres tonight at 10. This New York legal drama doesn't have the living, breathing dimensionality and character depth of FX's finest, including "Rescue Me" and "The Shield," on which Close guest starred in 2005. But it's a tense fun ride like the better John Grisham movies, where the tables turn on the good and the bad guys, millions of dollars are at risk, and innocent bystanders lose their lives, their dogs, or at least their innocence.
Close presides over the twisty suspense. As the devious, masterful Patty, she runs her law firm like a New Age guru, with divisive head games and a taste for lofty architecture. She's always one step ahead of her team, which includes Tate Donovan as her lackey, and she plays each member slowly, surely, as she inches them toward a checkmate. And she's always two steps ahead of her opponent, billionaire CEO Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson ), who sold his company stock before it crashed, but let his employees lose their retirement savings. Patty is righteous about finding justice for the employees in this
Into this web comes Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) , a bright young lawyer who's engaged to a bright young doctor. Everyone in the firm knows that Ellen, so eager and honest, is Patty's new pawn, and yet they envy her the boss's trust and attention. Most of "Damages" is told as a flashback from an opening sequence in which we see Ellen in a state of shock and spattered with blood, so we know what they don't -- that the new girl's prospects are anything but enviable. As Ellen, Australian actress Byrne is both appealingly fresh and yet ordinary enough to make us wonder why Patty is so interested in her.
As the secondary villain, Danson is well cast. Frobisher is a creep, but he's a greedy, hedonistic creep who lacks Patty's almost demonic foresight and control. Next to Patty, he is close to sympathetic. And he keeps his hands clean, leaving the dirty work to his goons, including a lawyer played by the always menacing Zeljko Ivanek, who, unfortunately, adopts an unconvincing Southern-ish accent for this role.
Most of FX's post-"Sopranos" dramas work to humanize the morally reprehensible behavior of their lead characters -- the doctors of "Nip/Tuck" or Denis Leary's firefighter on "Rescue Me." That's what lifts the shows above their genres. And if "Damages," which was created by Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman , actually goes on to make us root for Danson's billionaire, or Close's tiger, the series will certainly rise in my estimation. The kind of moral ambiguity and shiftiness that sets the viewer thinking about his or her reactions is what "Damages" needs to push harder to twist up its conventions. Otherwise, it will be no more, but also no less, than a tight legal thriller with a killer actress at the helm.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog/. 
