The Hebrew Hammer

When I first read about Showtime's new drama, Ray Donovan, I was so excited. The titular character, played by Liev Schreiber -- an actor I really like! -- is a Hollywood fixer, working for lawyers who represent entertainers and athletes and other high-profile people with good reasons to keep their private business really private. The series premiere alone found our hero heading off bad publicity for an action star whose sexual preference runs to M-to-F pre-op transsexuals, and a pro basketball player with the misfortune to wake up next to a dead girl; he was also sent after a producer's starlet girlfriend and "dealt with" (viciously assaulted) her stalker. Fascinating, right? Too bad every subsequent episode has sidelined Ray's fixer activities in favour of business involving his ex-con father Mickey (Jon Voight), his misogynist's fever dream of a wife (Paula Malcomson), and his extremely boring children (Kerris Dorsey and Devon Bagby). But even as Ray dicks around with his plots to get his kids into a nice private school and manage his addict brother's new Diocese-settlement wealth, there's one guy on the show who still takes the hallowed fixer profession seriously: HaShem, please rain your blessings unto Avi (Steven Bauer).

The three people in Ray's operation could be plotted on a spectrum from least hard to hard as hell. In addition to her skills with tech (other than that time vigorous sex dislodged the microphone she'd planted in that hotel) Lena (Katherine Moennig) is a lady and can therefore be deployed on tasks where it's essential to make other ladies and girls feel at ease -- as in the latest episode, in which she pretended to be a fashion photographer in order to lure an FBI agent's wife and daughter to Ray's office and hold them hostage until the agent agreed to narc on another agent trying to build a case against Ray. (Of course, Lena also responded to her girlfriend's wishy-washiness by going to the girlfriend's office and punching her in the face, so: maybe the least hard, but not soft.) Ray can infiltrate elegant spaces in his beautiful suits and not stick out as a thug, but he can also beat someone practically to death if the situation calls for it. And Avi is a hired goon, with no pretensions otherwise.

What makes Avi so lovable (to me) is exactly that lack of pretension. He does his job without any internal conflict because it's a good job for someone with his skill-set. From what we've seen, most of the people he fucks up deserve it. "Even an FBI agent?" Well, yeah, maybe not, but all Avi does to him is dose his coffee with LSD and follow him around as he's tripping balls, and frankly someone as OCD as that dude should have noticed that his coffee wasn't in the same spot he left it anyway.

The latest episode gives us more Avi than I think we've seen to this point, and what we saw only made me like him more. As someone who has taken many road trips with a person whose minuscule bladder requires stops far more frequent than my camel-like ability to hold it does, I empathized with Avi's frustration at Sully (James Woods), his wife (Mary Mara), and their stupid dog for needing to pee every half-hour. THAT'S NOT HOW YOU MAKE GOOD TIME. I guess they couldn't help not having Avi's unerring focus on getting the job done -- but when Sully had to murder Mrs. Sully for opening up her big stupid mouth on the phone and Avi -- gamely enough, under the circumstances -- dug her a shallow grave, I hope Sully regretted all his urinary inefficiency.

Shows from Star Trek to The Wire to The Venture Brothers have shown us that the noble profession of henchman sometimes offers few (or too-transitory) rewards and scant job security, so I worry for Avi's long-term prospects -- particularly now that we know he has a mother he looks after that someone could use against him the way I assume he's used other people's mothers against them in the past. Should that happen at some point, I guess it would be only just, given that Avi is not really a great person, by most standards. But as long as rich idiots are creating problems, someone is going to have to fix them in whatever ways make practical if not moral or ethical sense. And can Sully please just hurry up and take out Mickey so that the show can quit being about the Donovan boys' tragic backstory actually being about fixers fixing shit? Honestly!