Take the sons of an ageing lowlife Boston hood and transport them to Hollywood. The premise is like Entourage reimagined by Dennis Lehane. But since 2013, Showtime’s Ray Donovan has quietly built a reputation as a powerful family/crime drama. The criminal turned Hollywood fixer Ray (Liev Schreiber) is our focus as he mops up the messes of his Hollywood clients while dealing with the far more combustible conflicts in his shipwreck of a family. The show started on Showtime in the US on Sunday and returns to Sky Atlantic tonight, bringing with it some of the strongest character acting around.
Tony Soprano once wondered whatever happened to Gary Cooper – the strong silent type handling his business, repressing his feelings like a real American before everything became “dysfunction this and dysfunction that and dysfunction vaffancul!” Ray Donovan is one such American and, just like Tony Soprano, he is an emotional basket case as a result. If a movie company’s most bankable star has got a dead trans sex worker in his hotel room, it’s Ray who knows exactly who to call, who to pay off and who to shoot to make sure the story doesn’t come out. In action he’s devastating, in the same league as hall-of-fame fixers such as George Clooney’s Michael Clayton, Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction and Uncle Pete from Damages. Whatever unholy decadence Hollywood throws at him, Donovan is unflappable, aloof and effortlessly menacing.
It’s only when it comes to his family that he really struggles. His biggest headache is his father, Mickey (Jon Voight, whose performance won him a Golden Globe in 2014). Freshly released from prison as the show begins, Mickey is an incorrigible heel – the worst mix of slick talker, deadbeat dad and emotional leech you could dream of. Having long since written him off, Ray has to watch as Mickey inveigles himself into the family again – a family already screwed up beyond repair.
Most vulnerable of all is Ray’s younger brother, Bunchy. Sexually abused as a child by a Catholic priest, the self-proclaimed “sexual anorexic” is a perpetual manchild lurching from one life crisis to the next. Also damaged but infinitely tougher is older brother Terry (Eddie Marsan) who battles the Parkinson’s he developed during his career as a boxer and now trains fighters at his LA gym. It’s a similar story to that of Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s trainer, although while Roach commands a seven-figure fee for each fight, Terry lives cheque-to-cheque, like the majority of boxing trainers. Nothing could ever come easy.
Predictably, you can take the boys out of Boston, but the city runs through them like an infected wound. Ghosts from the past, their sister’s suicide, Catholic guilt and attacks from Boston journalists and crime families binds them together in a clannish solidarity whether they like it or not. The show may be set in LA, but its heart and soul is in Southie.
At the end of season two, we left the Donovan clan in a familiar state of chaos, with Terry looking at jail time for the disastrous weed dispensary heist, Mickey preparing to blow his bonanza win on the horses, Bunchy gradually reconciling with his fears that he may be a paedophile and Ray dissolving his fixer operation while facing an uncertain future with his unfaithful wife, Abby (Belfast-born actor Paula Malcomson).
We can expect more trauma as the third season begins, along with some impressive new additions to the cast. Ian McShane arrives as billionaire movie producer Andrew Finney, with Katie Holmes playing his daughter, Paige. They follow in the footsteps of memorable recurring cast members from previous seasons: Rosanna Arquette, Sherilyn Fenn, Wendell Pierce and James Woods. Strong writing will always attract talent.
Ann Biderman, the show’s creator and woman behind the excellent TNT police drama Southland, talks about taking on Ray Donovan and her desire for a show that “referred back to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Robert Mitchum but that also tackled family dynamics”. The marriage of noir and melodrama pays off even as Biderman passes the baton on to Dave Hollander for the third season. Biderman may dismiss modern male cinematic heroes as “manorexics” and “mumblecore neurotics”, but the spirit of Gary Cooper lives on. From Boston to LA, there’s still room for a street fighting man.
