Ray Donovan

This is hardly a one-character show. Ray is at the center of the movie-land maelstrom, to be sure, but everything around him is intriguing. And everything speaks to danger.

Occupying familiar anti-hero territory with grim and often outrageous resolve, Ray Donovan is a sun-bleached noir and a character actor's paradise.

While the series possesses enough pleasures, guilty or otherwise, to warrant a secure place in the DVR queue, it still feels like a program that is finding its way--seeking a balance between the seedy underbelly of L.A. glamor and the most dysfunctional of family dramas, connected by a fixer who’s mostly a downer.

In trying to balance Elmore Leonard-styled grime, cultural satire, and family-focused subplots, Ray Donovan remains a well-crafted series that, like its title character, suffers from an identity crisis. [11 Jul 2014, p.65]

Ray Donovan, meanwhile, continues to find its way. The show about a Hollywood fixer has added a number of guest stars, including Hank Azaria, Sherilyn Fenn and Wendell Pierce, none of whom has yet made me care as much about the dysfunctional relationship between Ray (Liev Schreiber) and his father (Jon Voight) as about whatever's going on between Ray and his wife, Abby (Paula Malcomson).