Damages

The seeds planted in the earliest episodes of the season promise a narrative as rich and complex as season one.

This is TV's best and brightest at the moment, and a wonderful tribute to New York's resurgent TV production industry.

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.

Forget everything I ever wrote about "Mad Men." This is the best drama series on television.

Seeing all these top-flight actors respond to the tautness and the challenges of this material--and they do get their share of emotionally charged scenes--well, it’s like Christmas.

When you watch the show, which returns for season two tonight at 10, you'll find a legal thriller that's trashier and more fun than you might have expected.

The first episode may be a bit rocky in the beginning, what with the reintroduction of characters and story lines, but the second season of Damages promises to be even better than the first.

The series retains its challenging, jumping-through-time storytelling.

It only takes two episodes to demonstrate that this season is going to be another wild ride, maybe even one that's a little more nuanced and unpredictable than the first.

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?

All in all, a great good time with not one single character to like. Now, that's entertainment!

It's a smart, speedy melodrama, supported by a terrific cast and driven by a rip-roaring star. Damages is more than Close, but she's so compelling, it would be worth watching for her alone.

The show's trademark time shifts continue, although it's initially unclear if they're connected to the season one story that carries over or to the season two plot.

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.

Nothing is as it seems--too much of the time. Intrigue is good; circular storytelling to the point of viewer exhaustion is bad.

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.