Damages: Season 3

The third season of US legal drama Damages distinguishes itself by shaking off the shackles of a difficult second year and pillaging recent financial front pages for many memorable moments.

Predicated on a Devil Wears Prada-type angle, legal hotshot Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) schools her underling Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) on the job at Hewes & Associates, the former's law firm. Drawing on the precedent of Steven Bochco's superlative Murder One, each season is given over primarily to a multi-character, multi-stranded law case that takes up the thirteen episode season and this year the parallels are more obvious than previous outings. Louis Tobin (Len Cariou) has created a pyramid type investment scheme which has led to hundreds of thousands of people investing in a business bound to fail - parallels with Bernie Madoff are obvious from the start.

Following the abrupt finale of Season 2, it's all change at Hewes & Associates: Ellen now works for the District Attorney’s office and, as Patty goes after the family Tobin (or more pointedly the money that must have been stashed), these changes are for the betterment of the show. We are also treated to some against type turns as the show grows in stature and so can attract the great and the good of the acting fraternity, thus the Tobin family is peppered with some nice scenery-chewing turns.

Lily Tomlin plays the down-trodden wife, Martin Short is the family lawyer and the under-rated Campbell Scott (anyone remember him from the Julia Roberts early 90's cancer weepie Dying Young?) plays Louis's son. It is perhaps only the latter that can hold his own against the powerhouse that is Close, proving that there are great roles out there for women of a certain age, even if they do only seem to be on television. Ted Danson also makes a welcome return as Arthur Frobisher with his Christopher Walken-esque delivery still intact.

The only slightly negative issue to level at the series is the use of fractured narratives and especially the flash-forward technique to reveal key information that will befall the leads. Damages shows another strike for television being the truly innovative medium of the new century and another case of the US leading the way in cutting edge drama.



Released on DVD on 18th October 2010 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment UK.

> Buy the DVD boxset on Amazon.

Reviewed by Simon Cole.