Look at me: Showtime's Ray Donovan

A satisfaction of Showtime’s Ray Donovan may be seeing Hollywood’s and other grossly over-privileged misbehavers meet their match in a bare-knuckle family from Southie. 

 

The title character Ray (Liev Schreiber) is a Hollywood fixer with roots in South Boston’s one-time hardscrabble Irish neighborhood. The ex-Southies wear their accents like casual sportswear. Los Angeles characters and plots emerge from between the lines of film noir’s golden age—it all was there before unspoken.

Ian McShane and Katie Holmes as father and daughter in a James Ellroyesque subplot involving an NFL franchise in Showtime’s Ray Donovan.

Schreiber’s Ray is the more realistic underplayed: a menagerie of other characters more than make up for his low key. From boyhood Ray has read people better than words. He speaks in short declarative sentences. He makes himself a cipher and has “a special talent for violence”. His super power is his ability to read people’s weaknesses clearly and act effectively on them. His kryptonite is his “Fawdda” Mickey (Jon Voight), a sociopathic small-time Southie hood and jailbird, because a sociopath is a blank page.

“Fawdda” (Jon Voight) and son Ray Ray (Liev Schreiber) in Showtime’s Ray Donovan.

Ann Biderman’s seven-season series is unusual in that what one might first take for a set formula and characters—such as Hollywood Hostess Twinkies serially pulled from steamy water and Evil Media Emperors getting their due—is a family drama in which characters grow and develop as their circumstances and settings change. It helps not to get too attached to any formula, situation, or character.

Susan Sarandon’s media mogul Samantha Winslow takes a mile before an inch is offered in Showtime’s Ray Donovan.

It once was said that the only living creature which could survive an atomic blast is the cockroach. This show adds Mickey Donovan to that list. His speech patterns, addytoods, body language, and manipulations eerily foreshadow a political figure who took national center stage several years after the 2013 series debut. Mickey is as charming as he is surreally creepy. Voight received a 2014 Golden Globe Award for the role and was nominated again the following year.

“Fawdda” Donovan as though eerily channels a coming political phenomenon in Showtime’s Ray Donovan.

The series opens with Mickey’s release from Massachusetts state prison five years short of a twenty-five-year stretch for the murder he didn’t commit. There are plenty more where that came from: he notches his pistol on the ride home. Viewers then see his son Ray go about an everyday routine in Los Angeles. But it is through Mickey that viewers meet the other sons: stand-up Terry (Eddie Marsan channeling Burgess Meredith), priest-haunted, sad sack Brendan “Bunchy” (Dash Mihok), and their younger, eager-for-approval, Black half-brother Daryll (Pooch Hall).

Donovan brothers Bunchy (Dash Mihok), Daryll (Pooch Hall), and Terry (Eddie Marsan).

Ray’s backstory is that he left “collection work” in Boston to go West with his mentor Ezra Goldman (Elliott Gould). He made good. He brought his wife Abby (Paula Malcomson) to LA the way immigrants brought their wives from the Old Country after they set themselves up. Ray and Abby have two Angelino children, Bridget (Kerris Dorsey) and Connor (Devon Bagby). They try to gentrify the family in Calabasas—a San Fernando Valley McMansion fiefdom which Abby in her Southie accent cut with a meat cleavah critiques as “the friggin’ Jersey Shore of LA.” Ray sets up his brothers Terry and Bunchy in a fight club in Hollywood.

Bridget (Kerris Dorsey) and Connor (Devon Bagby) seek light in the shade of the Donovan tree from mother Abby (Paula Malcomson).

Ray and his team, Avi (Steven Bauer), an ex-Mossad operative, and the versatile Lena (Katherine Moennig), an office manager with a mean right hook, manually photoshop the peccadilloes of Hollywood’s rich and famous. As his lawyer complains of a celebrity client: “Suck one cock, you’re a cocksucker for life; get caught in bed with a dead girl, admit to a drug problem, go to rehab: no problem.” The work gets more challenging as the seasons progress, more like riding a death-defying roller coaster creating its own track on the fly.

Ray’s team: versatile Lena (Katherine Moennig) of the mean right hook and ex-Mossad operative Avi (Steven Bauer).

They tangle with progressively richer, more powerful, and scarier clients and adversaries, from movie studio and real estate moguls to mobsters and finally the mayor and police department of New York. But Ray’s sworn lifelong—and often resented—mission of trying to protect his family gets more difficult as the stakes rise. The children grow up. Various family members are in and out of county, state, and federal lock-up more quickly than Dorothy noticed characters come and go in The Wizard of Oz. Ray’s intensely stressful days and nights swing more and more wildly between his occupational roller coaster and a similar family vehicle hurtling no less willy-nilly in the opposite direction.

James Wood does a bang-up Whitey Bulger, with Avi (Steven Bauer) in Showtime’s Ray Donovan.

One of the show’s pleasures are familiar faces that turn up along the way: James Woods as a version of James “Whitey” Bulger, Hank Azaria, Rosanna Arquette, Wendell Pierce and Domenick Lombardozzi of The Wire, James and Stacy Keach, Diane Ladd, Susan Sarandon, Alan Alda, and many others. Sandy Martin rates special mention for chomping scenery alongside Voight as a rollickingly updated Southie Mrs. Gamp.

Mickey (Jon Voight) and Aunt Sandy (Sandy Martin) chomp scenery in Showtime’s Ray Donovan.

Another pleasure is the series music, credited to Marcelo Zarvos. Classic pop songs can be as cliché as period settings they background. Here the classics turn up where expected but mix with lovely new interpretations which echo moods and often color settings for episode codas.

Motel Lady (Diane Ladd) to Mickey (Jon Voight): “It doesn’t lick itself.”

The seasons change from one to the next, each posing “a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous,” a cast of hundreds, family drama, and a great deal more of everything than MP has touched on here to avoid plot spoilers.

 

Look at me: it gets bettah…

Ray Donovan (2013-20) U.S. Showtime. Creator: Ann Biderman.