Ray Donovan: “The Bag Or The Bat”

Ray Donovan debuts tonight on Showtime at 10 p.m. Eastern.
Ray Donovan’s greatest flaw is its utter lack of ambition. Its second greatest flaw is that it possesses too much ambition, to the degree that it sometimes seems like it’s about to go flying off the edge of the Earth. There are good moments in every episode sent out to critics—five in total—but they’re not enough to overcome the crushing sameness of so much of what happens here, nor are they enough to overcome the sense that this show, ambitious as it is, has absolutely no center. Or, put another way, the best thing about the serialized TV drama in the post-Sopranos era is its ability to surprise. Think of any great drama from the last 14 years that you want, or even several dramas that were nearly great but didn’t quite manage the trick. All of them boasted surprising, shocking moments that, once revealed, seemed completely necessary for the characters and story after you thought about it for a second. Ray Donovan, at least as of yet, has none of that. It proceeds strictly to plan, right down to the obligatory fourth episode that takes the protagonist out of his element to underline how little he knows his own family.
At the center of Ray Donovan is the titular protagonist, a man from a working-class background in Boston who’s remade himself as a powerful Hollywood “fixer.” He’s the guy whom Los Angeles’ power elite call when they’re in a jam they simply can’t get out of, and he and his team swoop in to save the day. (In the opening moments of the pilot, that involves a famous actor who’s caught with a trans-woman, as well as another famous client who wakes up in bed with a dead woman. Ray’s solution to this seems novel until you realize that you probably just thought of it right now when thinking up possible situations yourself.) In such a pure expression of the Vocational Irony Narrative (a term coined by Hitfix’s Dan Fienberg to refer to stories about professionals who are unable to perform said profession on their own lives—the physician who cannot heal himself, etc.) that it seems vaguely insulting, Ray can fix anybody’s problems but his own. He’s got one complicated family at home and another represented by his father, released from a Massachusetts jail and headed to the West Coast to collect on some old debts.
At every level of Ray Donovan, it’s evident that talented people are working on the show. The list of directors seems like Showtime has unleashed the cable directing all stars on the proceedings, including three episodes from longtime HBO hand Allen Coulter and one from John Dahl, who’s done such great work over at FX in the past few years. The series’ creator and showrunner is Ann Biderman, an Emmy winner for her work on NYPD Blue and the woman who created Southland (though it should be said that her involvement in the series had decreased substantially once it finally took a turn toward the excellent), and just having a female showrunner’s perspective on the troubled man archetype that’s run through so many of the great series of the past decade and a half is refreshing, at least in spots. There are places where it seems evident that Biderman has no patience for Ray’s machismo or haunted expression, but they are, sadly, undercut by the places where she seems intent on underlining in red ink what a big, swingin’ dick this guy is. Still, if anyone is going to pull this show together, it’s Biderman, and this is definitely the sort of show that could take a while to find itself.