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Positive:
73
Mixed:
7
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Season 2 Review:
One of the addictive things about Damages is its ability to work what initially seems to be a peripheral character like Olyphant's into the series' core plot in a startling way. All credit is due to the show's creators--brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman--who wrote the first two episodes with smoothly intricate plotting and bursts of melodrama that rarely spill over the top.
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Jul 5, 2012
Season 5 Review:
The first episodes are very promising, full of feints, fibs, and a big, fat shock. [16 Jul 2012, p.40]
Season 1 Review:
Close’s burnished enigma characterization works beautifully because Damages, which will spend its 13-episode season detailing the six months that led to the opening shots of a blood-covered Ellen escaping a murder scene, is more a well-oiled genre exercise than the stuff of rigorous personality study.
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Season 2 Review:
This is the kind of show in which seeing new cast member Timothy Olyphant stare at Byrne from across a grief-support-group circle feels like both an act of violence and empathy, and this is before you even know who the hell he is. Since this is the secret-filled Damages, chances are we may never fully know. Would you want this knife’s-edge thriller any other way?
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Season 3 Review:
The series retains its trademark flash forwards that signal murders and/or deceits yet to be revealed. It's one of the show's more operatic touches but this time the revelation, a fantastic and personal driver for stories, feels less like an attempt to manipulate the audience and more rooted in the plausible.
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Season 3 Review:
This time around everyone, Byrne in particular, moves with an air of confidence that allows you to keep your eyes on the knives being juggled in the air rather than the person doing the juggling. Which is exactly where you want the audience's eyes to be when you're pulling off a con, or a show like Damages.
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Jul 17, 2012
Season 5 Review:
While the show's certainly grown more tightly plotted in the last several seasons, especially after cutting the number of episodes down to 10 and reducing (often via murder) the number of secondary characters, Damages is still suffering from some seemingly needless bloat.
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Jul 29, 2011
Season 4 Review:
The poisoned relationship of attorneys Ellen Parsons and Patty Hewes has gone slack. But The supporting cast is superb. [8 Aug 2011, p.40]
Season 3 Review:
Scott is terrific as the conflicted son who's something of a sap, a patsy for Patty and Winstone. Plus, we're promised more Ted Danson as Arthur Frobisher, a reason for celebration. And the bottom line on Close is: Nobody upstages Patty. It's the character's curse, and the actress' triumph.
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Jul 12, 2011
Season 4 Review:
To its credit, Damages remains the kind of show that demands genuine attention; there's no reading the newspaper or scribbling crosswords while watching it. Moreover, Goodman, Close and Baker are the kind of fine actors that a certain class of viewer would happily watch read the phone book. It's just that given the pacing in these first two episodes, that analogy's not far off.
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Season 1 Review:
The plot is difficult to follow - shot sequences, at least in the first two episodes, often pair sex and death (an FX trademark, practically; it’s the network that looks our animal selves in the eye), whether or not their pairing helps the story--but you’re strung along deftly enough so that you do want to know how it’s all going to play out.
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Season 2 Review:
Damages works best when it doesn't show its cards early on, so it's hard to make definitive judgments after only a handful of episodes. Predicaments and positions can often change, and seeing a character move from one end of the ethical spectrum to the other can be reinvigorating. Here's hoping there'll be a few such shifts along the way.
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Season 3 Review:
Regardless of whichever cathartic moment wins out this season), no intervention at the level of systemic injustice will have transpired, even allegorically. In such a thoroughly and inescapably capitalist vision of the world, structural injustice is not only profitable, but necessary to the maintenance of the system of the series.
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Season 2 Review:
Toward the end of the second episode, two characters who have no business acting chummy with each other get in the back of a car together and do exactly that. And rather than make me eager to pop in my screener of the third episode (which I did, eventually), it just killed all the buzz I had built up to that point.
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Season 1 Review:
Patty's suppose to be a manipulative liar, but that's too much to believe. Like pretty much everything about this show. [03 Aug 2007, p.61]
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