I Like to Watch

July 29, 2007 | In the old days, TV writers used to give their characters lovable traits: He has a soft spot for the downtrodden! She's self-involved but ultimately principled! He sings in the shower! She makes great banana bread, and sneezes cutely around cats!

These days, crazy is the new lovable. All you need to get viewers hooked on a character is a succulent psychological disorder or two: Awww, he's so obsessive-compulsive! Look, an alcoholic with violent mood swings! How cute! Her sense of self is so malleable. Oh, I love it when she gets all socially withdrawn and displays flattened affect like that!

Lead characters still have back stories, but they're usually accompanied by a psychiatric interpretation that justifies a whole host of dangerous quirks, from grandiosity to paranoia to sociopathic tendencies. Robert McKee's screenwriting bible "Story" has been replaced by the DSM-IV: Writers simply close their eyes and point to a page, then delight in the possibilities presented by long lists of lively maladies and disturbing behavioral tics.

If our TV sets are fun house mirrors that reflect who we are (except with whiter teeth and more money), then it looks like most of us are ready for the funny farm.

Fatal subtraction
I bet the funny farm is a blast, though, judging from the good times all these lunatics on TV are having. Whether they're running red lights with young kids in the back seat, blackmailing their enemies, or robbing banks with semiautomatics drawn, today's criminals are tomorrow's high-spirited heroes!

FX should be renamed the Nutcase Channel, given its preoccupation with characters who belong in the nut house or the big house or both. This summer, the narcissists of "Nip/Tuck," the psychopaths of "Rescue Me," the schizophrenics and histrionics of "Dirt" and that scheming tyrant on "The Shield" are joined by perennial wacko Glenn Close, starring as a high-stakes litigator with antisocial personality disorder on "Damages" (10 p.m. Tuesdays on FX). Close's Patty Hewes considers herself a crusader for the little guy, but she appears to have even less regard for moral standards than the corrupt CEOs and careless corporations that are the targets of her lawsuits.

Close is deliciously evil here, as always. She embodies the sort of malignance you can't peel your gaze away from: composed, steely eyed, fearless and vaguely amused. Patty Hewes' raw power and powers of persuasion are set up to feel almost mystical. All of her underlings and rivals keep telling us the same thing: Fear her! She always gets what she wants! She'll stop at nothing! And Hewes lives up to all of the hype, shifting from genial to icy cold in seconds, depending on her rapidly evolving strategy. In a less talented actress's hands, this extreme psycho-lady act would ring false, but Close has always had a way of making her lunacy seem alternately smooth and just awkward enough to put us on edge.

Riveting as such an extreme character can be, the whole moral equation of the modern TV drama seems to have evolved to a point of no return. Beyond the usual "She'll win at any cost" cliché, we're prodded to find Hewes utterly repellent: In the final twist of last week's pilot (Spoiler alert! Don't read this if you haven't seen it), we discover that Hewes has a dog killed in order to get the dog's owner to testify. OK, I get it -- she's really evil. Vic Mackey and Tony Soprano could shoot an innocent man in cold blood, but kill a doggie? No friggin' way!

But even as we're prompted to be horrified by Hewes, her unrepentant nastiness, when paired with her immense power, leaves us very little to hope for here. Ellen (Rose Byrne), her new hire, might be one source of hope in the story, except that we already know, thanks to some gruesome flash-forwards, that Ellen's life is going to fall to pieces in a few months, most likely due to some nefarious actions by her nasty employer. And it's obvious that Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), the corrupt mogul who cashed in millions in his company's stock right before it went bankrupt, is going down, the perfect post-Enron whipping boy -- which is too bad, really, because aside from being evil, he's one of the more sympathetic characters on the show.

There will be twists, of course. Twists are what shows like "Damages" are all about. It reminds me of the Grisham suspense thrillers of the early '90s, that mix of twists, high stakes and evil characters with awe-inspiring degrees of intelligence, foresight and craftiness. The problem is that, unlike the short thrill ride of "The Firm" or "The Pelican Brief," we're supposed to stay interested in the very bad people of "Damages" for an entire season or more. If the show were more character-driven, like "The Sopranos," we might be able to invest in a tireless sadist and her masochistic entourage. But this is a suspense-driven story, fueled by such extreme behavior that there is no up and down and no right and wrong. Without gravity, is a tightrope artist really all that impressive?

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