EV = (Plot+Humor+Suspense)Enjoyment/Time+Emotional Investment. Here are some of the early returns:
Damages - (FX, Tuesday) Like a shady law firm, Damages tricked its way onto my lineup. It started airing in August, confounding me into thinking it would be over before the regular season began. Now I'm hooked like a cheap lawyer to an ambulance. Damn you, Glenn Close! The music for the opening credits involves a growling voice singing just two lines: "Little lamb" and "When I get through with you, there wont be anything left." As a viewer please note, this will be your only warning.
The show operates very effectively in a flashback format, unspooling the tale of Ellen Parsons, a newly minted lawyer who finds herself tempted into working for Hewes & Associates, led by the indomitable Patty Hewes, aka Glenn Close. But I'm already getting ahead of myself. The first scene of the entire series shows a beautiful woman, who we come to learn is Ellen Parsons, stumbling bloody and terrified down a busy Manhattan street. Each episode scatters more puzzle pieces on the table, gradually assembling a story of how this bright penny of a lass stumbled into the web of Glenn Close and her adversary Arthur Frobisher, played with gleeful, amoral zest by Ted Danson, and ultimately ended up in prison for the brutal murder of her fiance. In this respect, the series reminds me a great deal of the French film Irreversible, a brutal film, not for the faint of heart, which begins with a horrifying murder and rape and then continues backwards to reveal how the principal characters ended up in such a wretched place.
I have not been this entertained by the tale of a young lawyer led astray by an evil boss since The Devil's Advocate; a film in which the Glenn Close role was played by Al Pacino who was actually playing Satan. Glenn Close is perfectly, richly, wickedly, manipulatively eeeevil in this show (for her first act, she orders a bloody hit on the puppy of a nervous witness). If I had to bet on Al Pacino's Satan, Esq vs Close's Patty Hewes, I'd flee the country.
EV = (100+100+100)100/100+100 = 150
Torchwood - (BBC-America, Saturday) As a fan of science fiction it is true that I admire Battlestar Galactica for the gravity (no pun intended) it has brought to the genre, with the politics and moral quandaries and philosophical musings on the nature of human suffering and what all. But sometimes you know, you just want to see an alien resembling a man in a gorilla suit and a diving helmet get blown to smithereens. It's also true that since the advent of the endless series Doctor Who, the Brits have really cornered the market on science fiction with a big side order of cheese. Now we have Torchwood, a series not only inspired by but actually spun off from Doctor Who, which very enthusiastically brings the cheese, along with the aliens and the sex and, although it has not been seen yet, sex with aliens, and possibly even sex with cheese.
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