At first, Ellen is straightforward. She tells Patty, "If you want to talk to me, don't play games. Just pick up the phone and call." She believes that working for the assistant district attorney is her true calling and will deliver her from the evil of Patty's ways. But as the Bernie-Madoff-alike Tobin case unfolds, Ellen realizes that Patty gets results in ways that her naive and politically motivated overlords never will. She's also romanced by Patty's odd mix of flattery and ulterior motives; she's transfixed by this woman's manipulations, her deviance, all hidden by her "Who me? Don't be silly!" mask, which Close brings to life with some deliciously malignant undertones.

This subdued standoff was the highlight of Monday night's episode, which left us guessing about what the hell Patty is up to, what Ellen is trying to pull, and whose side anyone is on in the end. What's brilliant about "Damages," though, is that the exact alignment of these women, what their aims with the Tobin case are, or whether they love or despise each other underneath it all, hardly matters. They're locked in some twisted battle or dance or duel or sophisticated game of one-upmanship, and they're both being fed by it. The best moment of "You Haven't Replaced Me"? When Ellen, in bed with her new do-gooder boyfriend who's obviously a pawn and not a real partner, puts down the phone after Patty's rude, aggressive 4 a.m. call, and smiles. She matters to Patty -- either as a pawn herself, or as an ally, or as a foe. Somehow, this gives Ellen a charge. Whoever wins or gets the last word or falls the hardest for the other's charms/trip wires, one thing is for certain: In Ellen, we're seeing a young Patty, drawn in by the lures of intimidation, power and victory at any cost.

Here are a few of the highs and lows of the night:

Best new twists on old features: 1) James Taylor's sweet, wavering voice singing live during the "In Memoriam" portion added a touching and personal dimension to this segment; 2) Remember when the dancing on the Oscars was limited to lackluster, paint-by-numbers choreography by hammy, foolishly costumed Broadway wannabes? The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers blew that tradition out of the water in bringing the best original score nominees to life. The dances for "The Hurt Locker" and "Avatar," in particular, were evocative and breathtaking.

Worst new twists on old features: 1) Neil Patrick Harris is very talented, but after last year's hilariously funny Hugh Jackman showstopper, this song and dance was only OK. 2) Bringing the best actor and actress nominees onstage in the first moments of the awards? Awkward and pointless. 3) The John Hughes montage was wonderful, but the tribute wandered astray with the big group of actors standing and honoring him with one or two sentences. "He gave us the gift of laughter," one of them says, thereby giving us the gift of queasiness and John Hughes the gift of turning in his grave.

Best joke of the night: Alec Baldwin explains, "In 'Precious,' Gabourey Sidibe is told she's worthless, nobody likes her, that she has no future. Hey, I'm with CAA too!"

Off-color joke of the night: Robin Williams: "Later this evening, the governor's ball will be held, just one of many balls being held all over Hollywood tonight."

Worst dressed: Miley Cyrus appears wearing what looks like one of those 24-hour girdles Jane Seymour used to hawk on TV.

Best exchange of the night: Between Robert Downey Jr. and Tina Fey, in a prelude to the best original screenplay.

Fey: Great movies begin with great writing.

Downey: What does an actor look for in a script? Specificity. Emotional honesty. Catharsis.

Fey: And what does a writer look for in an actor? Memorizing. Not paraphrasing. Fear of ad-libbing.

Downey: Actors want scripts with social relevance, warm weather locations, phone call scenes that can be shot separately from that insane actress that I hate, and long dense columns of uninterrupted monologue, turning the page, and for instance seeing the phrase, "Tony Stark, continued."

Fey: And we writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer-generated and their performances can be adjusted by us, on a laptop, alone.

Downey: It's a collaboration, a collaboration between handsome, gifted people and sickly little mole people.

Strangest moment: Elinor Burkett interrupts Roger Ross Williams while he's accepting the best doc short award. "Let the woman talk," she says. At first it looks like she's some random crazy person who jumped up onto the stage. It doesn't help that Roger Ross Williams doesn't really move over and let her stand in front of the microphone. Salon's Kerry Lauerman spoke to both Williams and Burkett post-Oscars, and the whole crazy clash is explained here.

Best impromptu joke: When screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher wins best adapted screenplay for "Precious," he gives a heartfelt but stunned speech and ends it all with, "Sorry, I'm drawing a blank here. Thank you, everyone." Martin appears and brags to the audience, "I wrote that speech for him."

Worst incidence of playing with fire: Several people give James Cameron credit for their Oscar and one calls him a genius. Is it really in our best interest to make James Cameron feel more powerful than he already does?

Least gracious remarks of the night: 1) Mo'Nique, "I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics." She's referring to the criticism surrounding her refusal to campaign for an Oscar, but it ends up sounding like a slapdown of her fellow nominees -- that if, say, Maggie Gyllenhal won the Oscar, it wouldn't have been about the performance.

2) Best costume design winner Sandy Powell (of "The Young Victoria") starts off her speech with, "Well, I already have two of these, so I'm feeling greedy. I'd like to dedicate this one to ..." It's not a handbag, woman. Guess this is just another ho-hum Oscar-winning day in her sparkly-hat life.

3) Joe Letteri accepting best visual effects for "Avatar": "Just remember the world that we live in is just as amazing as the one we created for you." Thanks for that little reminder. Also, remember that the real Lord and Savior and Creator of the Heavens and the Earth is just as all-powerful as James Cameron.

Most accurate mistake of the night: Keanu Reeves, who has become a parody of himself, comes out and speaks in his signature monotone. "Isn't he paralyzed?" asks my 12-year-old stepson. "Pretty much," I answer. "Oh, I was thinking of Christopher Reeves," he says.

Best introductions: Both by Steve Martin. 1) On Sandra Bullock: "You loved her in 'The Blind Side,' adored her in 'The Proposal,' and thought she was just OK in 'Miss Congeniality II.'" 2) On "Precious": "The one film that really lived up to the video game." 

Best gags: 1) Ben Stiller with a blue face and scary yellow eyes, speaking Na'vi. 2) Cutting to Martin and Baldwin backstage wearing Snuggies. 3) Martin and Baldwin's parody of "Paranormal Activity," in which they sleep fitfully all night in the same bed.

Best recovery: Just when the tributes to the best actor nominees is getting a little bit over-the-top with talk of the "enormous talent" of "the magnificent Colin Firth" and so on, Tim Robbins saves the day in his tribute to costar Morgan Freeman: "I'll never forget what you said to me about friendship on the last day of shooting. You said, 'Being a friend is getting the other a cup of coffee. Can you do that for me, Ted? It is Ted, isn't it?'"

Best reaction shot: When Stanley Tucci says of Meryl Streep, "The two movies we did together were the highlight of my career," Streep giggles at the audacity of this, which she clearly believes is an exaggeration.

Strangest trend of the night: Jokes about being gay. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin have numerous "we're a couple" gags, Colin Farrell brags about spooning with Jeremy Renner, and Sandra Bullock refers to "my lover Meryl Streep." It's official: Pretending you're gay is the new pretending you're not gay.

Most abrupt transition: In the wake of Kathryn Bigelow's best director win, Tom Hanks appears and announces that "The Hurt Locker" has won best picture without reminding us of all the nominees. There are 10 of them, after all, and even if they were introduced throughout the night, that doesn't mean we couldn't use a little suspense building, along with a glimpse at all of the honored filmmakers.

Best way to one-up your ex: By snatching two Oscars out of his hands in one night. "Avatar" is certainly an inspired film, not to mention the highest-grossing movie of all time. Maybe that's why it's particularly satisfying to see Kathryn Bigelow win best director -- the first woman to do so, by the way -- and best picture for her relatively humble film "The Hurt Locker." Suddenly her ex-husband (and our Lord and Savior and Creator of the Heavens and the Earth) Cameron seems not nearly as all-powerful as he did a few hours ago. Hurray for Bigelow! One small slap upside the head to the King of the World, and one giant step for womankind! 

Sure, when we're not impaired by the relentless drumbeat of empty tweets and Googled tragedies and breathless press releases about the latest jackhole to sign up for "Dancing With the Stars," we do try to reach out to each other, tenuously, through Facebook and Twitter and sometimes even by picking up our telephones, which haven't held a solid charge since Monica Lewinsky was running around the White House in capri pants.

But it's not the same. One decade into the new millennium, one too many irresistible up-to-date blurbs and blogs and snippets and tweets have smeared our once-lively spirits across the dirty windshield of life.

Except when we're in a really good mood, and then everything's fine.

Butt cheek of the gods

Thank the lords "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" (10 p.m. Fridays on Starz) is here to show us exactly when, where and how we went astray. Apparently, back in 73 B.C., human beings were gigantic and horny and all they did was have great sex and slash each other with steely blades, resulting in big bursts of blood that splashed everywhere. Hurray!

It seems that ever since that time, humans have steadily grown more vague and sullen, losing more muscle mass and joie de vivre each century that they walked the earth. With each passing decade came another reason to slouch and feel discouraged: the spinning wheel (ouch), barbed wire (drag), pasteurization (enough already), the electric nose-hair clipper (please). All of it led up to where we are today, namely, watching "House" while sobbing into a laminated cup of cherry Jell-o.

But fear not, because our new hero Spartacus is here to lead us out of the darkness, demonstrating exactly how we might get our souls back: namely, by having lots of frisky humpy time with meat-Chiclet-adorned macho men, then throwing big sharp knives at offensive strangers from across the room!

Of course, it all starts with the raping and pillaging of our home villages after being betrayed by the Romans. Next, our lovers are carried away and enslaved by Roman fiends and we're made to fight four men at once in the Colosseum (much like the Superdome but with more people sporting the then-fashionable boobs-out look). That ends in lots of blood splashing, and a rowdy mass of boobs-out heathens yelling out our (new, fake) name, which forces powerful men to harness our 15 minutes of fame for evil, rather than good. Next come the muscle men who lecture us menacingly in the shower while their gigantic penises bob along with every step, and then we do some defiant stuff that almost gets us killed, but finally we give in and agree to lug around huge logs and spar with other greased-up ding-dongs, so that, eventually? We're all puffy and fierce and ready to beat people's faces in until blood splashes across the camera. Mmm, it feels good to be alive, doesn't it? Who knew that our deliverance would come in the form of hand-to-hand combat, impromptu orgies and around-the-clock sipping out of fancy chalices of red wine? All right, I had some inkling.

Even if it doesn't free humanity from our current lackluster path, "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" exists on an entirely different planet from other televised entertainments. This is HBO's "Rome" on steroids, Viagra, LSD and crack: The sex scenes feature bare asses, bare breasts, slaves on hand to help masturbate their masters into the proper state of excitement, and haunted lutes playing in the background. The fight scenes are half "300," half "Mortal Kombat," replete with rotating severed heads, slow-motion flying buckets of blood that occasionally expand to fill the entire screen with a sea of red, and warriors who bellow, "We'll fuck your women. We'll fuck them all!"

Hell, even the straightforward conversations between two characters typically feature some gratuitous twist: Spartacus' archenemy stands, berating him while fully naked, his big cock practically piping up with its own sidekick tag lines ("Yeah, like my boss just told ya! You're dead meat, mister!"); Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) lounges in a see-through top, having a long conversation with her husband that we can't understand because we're being glamoured by her huge breasts; some character whispers "cunt" or "fuck whore" or any number of salacious things (like this nastiness, from Lucretia: "It all comes back round to a pair of tits and a tight little hole"). Sure, it worked on "Deadwood," but without the Shakespearean adornments, "fuck" often feels like an extra bucket of fake blood that you didn't really need to get your point across.

But then, the point or story is just window dressing to the slugging and screwing that we came to see here. When extremely fit human beings growl their paint-by-numbers Hollywood historical epic lines ("Nothing will keep me from returning to your arms, not the Romans, not the gods themselves!"), making sweet lyrical Abdominizer love, then slash their opponents knees in half with their glittering hatchets, we're offered a glimpse into an animal world we traded in for the sterilized, vacuum-sealed alienation of modern life.

No wonder this basic formula -- seethe, slash, screw, repeat -- dressed up as it is by CGI effects and blue-eyed star Andy Whitfield, isn't shocking more audiences with its over-the-top flashiness and pandering. Sure, some have called it "too rude for British TV," but who are we sleazy, foul-mouthed Americans to judge? The blogs certainly lit up last week when the gay gladiator, Barca (Antonio Te Maioho), made athletic love to his partner Pietros (Eka Darville), who grinned from ear to ear as if to say, "This is really my favorite perk of being a slave boy."

But those two are actually fond of each other, and are engaged in the equivalent of a standard under-the-sheets, missionary position compulsory routine, compared to the frenzied humping unfolding elsewhere: Batiatus (John Hannah) takes his ample-bosomed slave woman from behind, Lucretia (Lawless) rides her gladiator Crixius (Manu Bennett) into the sunset, and all of it is merely foreplay for the decapitations and gory mess that comes after it. Somehow the special effects, the sandals, the swords, and the mystical lutes distract us from the fact that this sex-followed-by-blood-bath may be the closest TV has come to snuff.

Naturally, ratings are through the roof for Starz -- 1 million at last count. So what does this tell us about the state of cable television in 2010? Maybe that if you throw out the rules and boundaries of middlebrow network television and create something depraved and lascivious and gruesome, with plenty of slashed throats and greased-up abs and CGI flourishes, you will emerge triumphant.

Or, as Doctore (Peter Mensah) puts it, "Forget everything you learned outside these walls, for that is the world of men. We are more, we are gladiators!" 

The next morning, Coach considers his options on a lonely walkabout, begs Boston Rob for a little man love and then, in a breathtaking demonstration of how insecurity is so often transformed, by sheer force of will, into self-aggrandizement, Coach swallows back his newfound vulnerability and takes refuge -- where else? -- in his old familiar friend, the superiority complex.

See how it works, kids? Now tap that self-doubt and rage and create your very own sense of superiority! Aided only by a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and years of alienation and loneliness, you, too, can set yourself above the fray.

When in doubt, remember the narcissist's mantra: They're just jealous. 

Let's consider the portrayals of marriage on TV available to us up until now: Angry couples about to divorce on "Dr. Phil," cutesy couples guffawing over their adorable children's goofy shenanigans with homemade explosives on sitcoms, and exhausted couples squabbling over who lost the map on "The Amazing Race." In all of these cases, you provide the commentary and the laugh track (especially on Dr. Phil).

On "The Marriage Ref," Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld do it for you.

Now let's consider the portrayals of celebrities available to us: We can gaze at photos of them in sweatpants taking their kids to the park, we can listen to their stilted attempts at warmth and spontaneity on the red carpet, or we can endure their longer, even more stilted attempts at warmth and spontaneity on late night talk shows. When celebrities speak instead of just standing around and looking pretty, they tend to speak at great length about whatever movie or show they're promoting, then titter nervously through the balance of the interview.

On "The Marriage Ref," stars finally have something fun and concrete to banter about: the absurd quarrels of married couples. Here's a husband who wants his stuffed dead dog displayed in the house, a wife who would like the dining room only to be used on Thanksgiving (the rest of the year it sits, fully decorated, but untouched), a husband who gets pedicures instead of spending time with his kids, a wife who wants her husband to stop taking off his wedding ring when he plays basketball or goes out with his friends.

"I think if you're going to stuff your dog, you should stuff it in either a useful or attractive position," Alec Baldwin remarks in the show's sneak preview.

"If he did not say 'shnooki' he might get it more," offers Tina Fey of one husband.

Later she adds, "Sometimes if a man is naturally hairy, and they remove too much hair? He looks like a hot dog."

Even Eva Longoria is funny on the show's full-hour premiere on Thursday night, admitting that she, too, keeps her dining room table fully adorned but unused year-round. Later, when Longoria refers to times when her husband, Tony Parker, sees her without makeup or a weave or her "chicken cutlet things" (presumably those adhesive push-up bra devices women wear with strapless dresses), Seinfeld interrupts to say, "You're the human equivalent of the formal dining room!"

Sorry, but I love this show. Yes, Tom Papa's affectations can be a little much sometimes. Yes, they should turn down the microphone when everyone is laughing. Yes, they should lose the dorky bit where Natalie Morales from NBC News sits in front of a computer and looks up information online. (We really don't need to know that 1,000 people nationwide stuff their pets, that pole dancing can burn up 250 calories per hour, or that dust is made up of human skin and dust mite excrement. If Tina Fey's eyes are glazing over? So are ours.)

But the rest? Married people, angry at each other? Celebrities, making fun of each other? Chicken cutlets? I'm in.

And guess who's on the show next week? Larry David, Madonna and Ricky Gervais. That's right, Madonna, our own personal queen of light and sound, the human equivalent of the refurbished, redecorated master bedroom suite with gigantic walk-in closet and Jacuzzi-tub-equibbed full-bath, will sit between attack dogs Larry David and Ricky Gervais, and discuss, of all things, marriage. That, my friend, is the very definition of must-see TV. 

While most viewers might tend to look at this subtext, burgeoning in the show's third season, as proof that "the whole thing is fake," such a perspective fails to acknowledge the many complex layers of said "fakeness," which amount to carefully considered marketing choices informed by an unseen wealth of data ("Am I the 'angry' one, the 'innocent' one, or the 'straight-talking' one? Should I appear confused and hurt or above it all? Which emotional response best matches my multi-tiered international product line?").

And let's not pretend such fakeness-as-elaborate-brand-building is confined to the most media-savvy, semi-hysterical circles of big city blowhards and publicity whore hounds and ankle-grabbing shape-shifters. We find ourselves, against our own wishes, thrust into a rapidly changing, increasingly self-promotional universe. To ignore the simple fact that branding is job one for everyone from corporate marketing types to your average, work-from-home freelance something-or-other is to cavalierly wave off the zeitgeist. Even the fully employed have one eyeball glued to self-promotion at all times, whether that means keeping their online résumés up-to-date, just in case, or tracking down and tagging every last human they've ever met in the course of a lifetime and forcing them to be a "friend" -- aka part of their personal target demographic -- on Facebook. In this crappy economy, in the modern age of digital alliances, self-branding is the new showering regularly: It's not just for hardcore douche bags anymore.

Thus, when you witness "real housewife" LuAnn de Lesseps trying to navigate a simple drink at a bar in the Hamptons with fellow "housewife" Bethenny Frankel, the layers of self-conscious opportunism and strategic positioning and recalibrating and careful flanking maneuvers are simply breathtaking.

LuAnn: How can I be your friend if I feel like every time I walk out the door you're going to say something mean? I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Bethenny: LuAnn, listen. We're not great friends, let's not sugarcoat this. I don't want to be great friends.

LuAnn: I thought you were my friend.

Bethenny: Well, we're not great friends. We haven't seen each other for months.

LuAnn: Yeah, I know, you haven't been there for me and my whole life fell apart.

Bethenny: I sent you a basket, when you first broke up with your husband.

LuAnn: (voice-over) Gift basket?! I wanted a hug!

Bethenny: I called you three times during the summer. We're not great friends, we never were great friends.

If the conversation sounds a little wistful, don't be fooled. These two women aren't weeping or even making human-like faces as this conversation unfolds; they're scowling and looking at each other suspiciously as if they're in the middle of a particularly tricky game of Texas Hold'em. Yes, here are two smart, well-maintained women, facing each other on bar stools in an empty restaurant in the Hamptons, thinking very, very hard about every word while the cameras roll. There are long pauses, with close-ups on their faces, often smirking ("What are you up to?") or squinting slightly ("She's so inauthentic! But how do I out-inauthenticate her?"). LuAnn can't quite decide whether to play the hurt divorcee or go on the attack in her signature polite, blinking, passive-aggressive, holier-than-thou way. The Polite Attack is quite clearly her personal preference, under these or any other circumstance, but the Hurt Divorcee is obviously the emotional style she and her handlers have chosen for this post-dumping season, since it guarantees her a bankable cachet among the millions of vulnerable divorcees who just read "Eat, Pray, Love" for the 60th time.

What's wonderful to witness, of course, is this postmodern clash of branding needs against actual emotional needs. Bethenny, she of "Skinny Girl" cookbooks and "Skinny Girl Margarita" fame, struggles less with this problem, of course, since she rather conveniently seems to have lost touch with heartfelt human emotions quite a long time ago. Except for occasional emergency types of situations and low-blood-sugar moments, we are to assume that Bethenny will maintain a high gloss of "over it, been there, done that, whatever" detachment, paired with a real knack for razor-sharp witty voice-over'ed nastiness and shrugging "I'm not with stupid" distancing. And that's nice, because that's exactly what her adoring fans want her brand to deliver, week after week. That, and margaritas you can get fall-down-drunk on without having an ass the size of a Mini Cooper.

What's even better, of course, is that moment where LuAnn deduces that the only proper way for a newly divorced Miss Manners type of guru to wrap up such an ugly exchange is to hug Bethenny warmly, force her to clink her glass to yours and let bygones be bygones. This disturbs Bethenny visibly, but she's caught in a trap: How can she refuse a hug and a clinkedy-clink without appearing "cold," which is something numerous marketing consultants and publicity experts have doubtlessly informed her presents a major threat to her worldwide distribution model? But when she gives in and hugs, her face says it all: What damage might this do to my reputation for never bullshitting anyone? LuAnn smiles sweetly. She can see that she has Bethenny in a tight spot, and it makes her eyes blink just a beat faster and more condescendingly.

Needless to say, the joys of the premiere of "The Real Housewives of New York City" are without number, from Bethenny and Jill's big breakup (caused by Bethenny telling Jill after one too many phone calls, "You need to find a hobby"), to Kelly's big chance to gang up on Bethenny with the others ("That girl, she has issues. She invented the margarita," Kelly snips in an unusually clever moment one can't help but imagine has been pre-scripted by a freelance joke writer). The whole delicious circus shifts into high gear almost immediately when Ramona invites everyone to a yacht party, breaks out her jewelry, refuses to apologize for Mario's mean words to LuAnn, weeps openly and calls Jill and LuAnn "the mean girls," then invites the mean girls back in around the table to toss back some shots like old buddies. Later, Bethenny flashes her tits, shows off her new boyfriend, acts busy and important (with the help of a laptop-toting assistant), then takes pot shots at her former BFF Jill ("When I hosted the 'Today' show? When I got there they said Jill called up there, saying 'Why wasn't it me?'").

Meanwhile, former smug married LuAnn plays "the hurt divorcee," former smug wacko Alex plays "the sane one," and former ringleader and occasional troublemaker Jill plays the one who really, truly believed she was nurturing lifelong friendships here (while selling fabulous fabric, natch), but the big, scary, mean world of nasty opportunists with ulterior motives cruelly disabused her of that notion.

All of which are highly marketable branding strategies for a rapidly changing global marketplace! See you next week, Real Brand Managers of New York City!