2 out of 5

Created By: Ann Biderman

Covers Season 1

One season down and ‘Ray Donovan’ managed, for 12 clunky, lumbering episodes, to tow that most frustrating of lines in television – just interesting enough to get you to tune in each week, but never of a quality that you walk away from any given episode actually satisfied.  While the writing is to be credited for never betraying its core dreariness or falling back on misdirection to bring us back next time, the show is still unnecessarily cluttered with subplots and ‘humanity sucks’ elements without giving us anything, or anyone to root for or uniformly root against… except for James Woods toward the season’s latter half, but we’ll toss him into the unnecessary subplot category.  All of this is a shame because with the extras scraped away, there’s a pretty devastatingly effective drama, with excellent performances from our leads – Liev Schreiber (Ray) and Jon Voight (Mickey, his father) – and though Ray’s family seem like caricatures, once you get past the accents, they start to come across a little too real, as unlikeable as they probably would be in real life.  To this extent the marketing of the series did it a disservice, pitching it as being about a Hollywood fixer, and perhaps that was the intention… as the first episode gleefully wallowed in such excess and depravity (and was pretty horrible for it, frankly)… but this soon
becomes clear as an extension of how Ray has fixed his own life, and the show seemingly forgets most of that side of things and starts shuffling cards around with an FBI investigation into Ray, and Ray’s plotting against his ex-con father, and Ray dealing with his brothers… some of which is interesting, but none of which gets the right balance of screentime.  Enough of the obnoxious elements are wrapped by season one to potentially give the show fresh footing going forward, but Ray Donovan is still a bit too stuffed with unlikeable characters and depressing concepts to let its viewer(s) in, despite the work put into designing a drama-drenched backstory and finding the right actors to make more focused material really sing.