Daily Blague

So, did anyone see Damages last night? It's the new legodrama on FX that stars Glenn Close. Isn't it the most amazing piece of crap?

To be sure, Glenn Close is magnificent in the role of Patty Hewes, the formidable plaintiffs' attorney who will do anything to bring her lawsuits to victory. When she's onscreen, it doesn't matter that the show is rubbish. Ms Close long ago perfected a Wicked Queen persona that is compulsively watchable. But when she's not onscreen...

For example, when Hollis Nye (Philip Bosco) sonorously informs Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) that the contract that she's about to sign (but won't) guarantees her employment for five years - or maybe it wasn't Mr Bosco but another actor in the scene - you gag. The law firm that hires associates on five-year contracts has yet to be invented. Associates are employees-at-will who can be fired without notice. (Partners are only somewhat harder to get rid of.) The scene, though brief, is utter confection, a tepid reheating of stock material. This is law as people who have never dealt with law firms envision it.

Damages isn't about law, though. It's about the price women pay for pursuing worldly - as opposed to maternal - ambition. Damages' price is preposterously exaggerated. Patty Hewes, although brilliant and glamorous, is obviously a vampire as well, and she will sooner or later sink her canines into Ellen's neck. Isn't that why the opening scene shows Ellen fleeing from an apartment, covered in blood? And then catatonically slumped in an interrogation room? Excelling in the footsteps of Patty Hewes will strip you of your humanity. Damages stokes the ancient resentment of powerful women that attributes to them crimes that even Attila the Hun would balk at.

Leaving for the office this morning, Kathleen told me that she might be out of touch this afternoon, meeting with her five personal shoppers at Bergdorf and waiting for Barbara Walters to show up in her dressing room. Seriously, though, she is going to ask her paralegal if she has ever seen an attorney standing in his office in boxer shorts. Kathleen certainly hasn't.

The difference in dramatic quality between Damages and Mad Men is huge. By the end of the summer, will friendships and marriages have foundered because of divided loyalties? Kathleen and I are safe, at any rate. She may never see Mad Men (although she'd like to - but she's so busy with those personal shoppers), but we're united in our scorn for Damages.