RAY DONOVAN

BINGE WORTHY

ICONIC BINGE

HOLLYWOOD MORALITY TAIL GETS A PROFESSIONAL FIX FROM SOUTH BOSTON

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Ray Donovan fixes the problems his A-List clients encounter by leveraging the anticipated immorality of Hollywood.

Liev Schreiber stars as the cold calculating mobster-type from South Boston that moves west to make his fame and fortune in Los Angeles among the elite of the entertainment industry.

Season one begins pretty innocently with this Bostonian accent finding a rough fit along the Pacific Ocean. All Donovan seems to be doing at first to get by is playing the heavy and getting friends of friends out of trouble.

As the episodes spin by quick enough, though, the happy at ease nuclear family is gradually more and more revealed to be an American crime family.

Abby Donovan is reel sweet on her husband, Ray, but she seems soon becomes revealed as being a pretty tough heavy too.

Once everyone is introduced to the machinations of what it is to be a fixer in Hollywood, an ensemble cast of characters becomes introduced one character at a time.

Eddie Marson plays one of Ray’s three brothers, Terry. Terry has a dynamic role as the operator of a boxing gym where he trains amateurs to be world champs.

Terry’s step-brother, Daryl, seems to be the gym’s best prospect for champion, while a third brother Bunchy, gets a spin off show within the show as a surviving of a pedophile priest.

Bunchy just seems to be hanging out in the gym until he gets a big settlement check from the church. And everyone begins to watch Bunchy as he tries to recover from an irreparable wrong done to him as a child.

Pooch Hall plays brother Daryl. Dash Mihok plays Bunchy.

Everything seems settled with everyone sharing screen time with Ray’s two children, Bridgett, played by Kerris Dorsey, and Conor, played by Devon Bagby, as the narrative travels from Ray’s home to the residences of his client’s, to the boxing gym and back to his home. To complicate matters, Ray also has a Los Angeles Condo that he keeps separate and apart from his family even though everyone knows he has a condo separate and apart from his family. The condo is a go-to place for a glass of scotch and some relaxation in between morally stressful jobs.

The expected immorality of Hollywood drives his success as a fixer. Sometimes a bit of blackmail helps, sometimes a big bag of cash and sometimes just the presence of Ray in the room with his reputation and all is what is needed to turn out the successful outcomes only seen in Hollywood on film and in television.

Ray is good with a gun and doesn’t shy away from making people disappear, but he also carries a baseball bat when he wants a bit of a change up to his outcomes.

Yes, the Federal Bureau of Investigations knows about Ray’s business, but Ray has some morality leverage on them as well.

Agent Frank Barnes has a parallel relationship going.

Agent Ed Cochran has a sexual fetish he cannot keep out of the office.

But the adrenalin really gets going when Ray’s father gets out of prison. Jon Voight plays career criminal Mickey Donovan.

Ray is a fixer, but Mickey is just a broken down hustler who can never come out on the winning side of a hustle.

Voight comes over from such feature films as Heat (1995) where he plays the fence to a gang of well-organized Los Angeles thieves, and Mission Impossible I (1996) where he plays the team commander.

Voight broke into feature films as Joe Black, the down-and-out-in-New-York-City cowboy hustler in Midnight Cowboy (1969) after playing bit parts in television westerns.

Voight and Schreiber are cast well together as that father and son in a relationship where the son hates his father for what he does and what he represents, and with the father just continuing on oblivious to doing anything wrong, stubbornly just not changing even one little bit for his son.

Ray’s life is complicated by Mickey’s presence because he’s the only one of his family wise to his father’s losing game of criminal chaos.

The show becomes intensely compelling by the second season, not for the characters so much as for the bullshit everything often turns into. When the situation becomes too out of control to fix, people begin to die, and Ray takes the gun out of the trunk of his car instead of the baseball bat.

The show doesn’t seem compelling enough to last more than two seasons after the first week of binging, but the narrative begins to turn in on itself with the fixer needing a bit of fixing.

The morality-take bends inward with Ray’s brother revealing that Ray was molesting by a Catholic priest in South Boston just like his brother, Bunchy was. Ray has kept the secret between his brothers, for the most part. But he gets drawn into the immorality he is vicariously involved in.

The part starts to take him apart bit by bit.

The episodic streaming television pulls people in for two or three episodes at a time in part because of the many guest appearances by well-known character actors in supporting roles.

Brooke Smith, Wendell Pierce, Katie Holmes and Lisa Bonet add to the ensemble cast or recuring characters, such as Elliott Gould, Kate Moennig  and Steven Bauer. Bauer played Manny Ribera in Scarface (1983) costarring Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Bauer and Moennig play Ray’s associates, providing intel, logistical support and back-up, and quite often back door work on certain more difficult jobs.

Lots of killing and execution style murders occur, but even more so, cash seems to flow between Ray and various entities to the point one begins to question why Ray is not a millionaire and doesn’t cash in his millions along a warm beach down further south.

Of course the Russian mob is involved, and like gambling in Las Vegas where the casino always wins in the end, the Russian mob always seems to come out ahead of the game with a bit more ruthlessness.

Like Ray’s internal profile, Ray’s family life seems rather copasetic for a few dozen or more episodes until Bridget and Conor become teenagers and start to show signs of having the family gene that has a propensity for criminal chaos.

Making matters worse, Abby goes into counselling and gets her unconditional love for Ray turned upside down by an intrusive psychoanalysis. The casting here is done with a bit of humor as Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation gets cast as the shrink (Brent Spiner).

Ray used his home life to get grounded between jobs, but Bridget starts dating a black singer deep into the criminal underworld of the LA music scene. And Conor begins to get an early start as a fixer, wanting to be just like his dad, much to the dismay of his parents.

With the stability that home life provides to Ray taken out of the equation, Ray gets deeper and deeper into the criminal underworld that he has been policing with impunity.

Ray Donovan (2013-2020) is streaming in all the glory of 45-60 minute episodes over 7 seasons on Paramount+.

SPOTLIGHT (2015)