Massholes

I haven't spent a lot of time watching 7th Heaven or The Secret Life Of The American Teenager, but on the rare occasions when I did, I found it hard not to speculate that they weren't just wholesome family dramas but the result of Brenda Hampton, creator of both shows, challenging herself to create spoofs of wholesome family dramas that were so bland and so straight-faced that they could subversively pass for the real thing. But no viewers -- not even really sheltered Christians -- could possibly think for every long that Secret Life was, like, a real show, could they? With multiple pairs of teenagers getting engaged to be married while they're still in high school? Ridiculous! I guess Hampton was serious with those two shows (that, or they both died natural deaths and she successfully trolled us all and may yet again!). But now I think the trickster is Ann Biderman, and that Ray Donovan so self-consciously embodies all the clichés of anti-hero dramas that it has to be either a parody, or the apotheosis that kills the genre for a generation.

You know how the world spent the past week being divided between (wrong) people who think that Breaking Bad's Walter White should be forgiven all his sins because he did them for his family, and (right) people who think that cooking meth and killing people is not quite analogous to Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child? Well, Ray Donovan's Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is also doing terrible things for the sake of his family...I guess? He spends even less time with his wife Bridget (Paula Malcomson) and children (Kerris Dorsey and Devon Bagby) than Walter White does, so it's even harder to buy that it's the support of his family that motivates Ray to deliver beatings, extort money, and dispose of bodies. He also supports "family" in the form of his troubled brothers -- sad but functional Terry (Eddie Marsan), and irreparably broken sex abuse victim Bunchy (Dash Mihok), and yes, I know that the proper term is "survivor," but Bunchy is not really surviving.

The burden of his responsibilities weighs heavily on Ray...I guess? He definitely seems morose all the time, but it's hard to tell exactly what is troubling him from moment to moment, because he doesn't really talk, to anyone, about anything. In the pilot, a joke is made about Ray staying silent as a power move, but after that, it doesn't play as a strategy, and there certainly isn't anything funny about it (or about much of anything else). Schreiber does what he can, but when the pivot point for all of the show's characters and events is just a human seethe, the viewer doesn't really have much to latch on to.

It's not that I blame Ray for being pissed off about his life. Between Bunchy's endless need and his shrewish wife's nagging and social-climbing, Ray's only safe place is his office, where he and his associates do nothing with their time but clean up the messes of rich, heedless idiots who are never appreciative enough of his efforts or hassle. The reason Avi (Steven Bauer) is such a pleasure to watch is because he's the guy I thought Ray was going to be -- a fixer who fixes shit without seeming to be tiresomely tortured about it all the goddamn time. Ray apparently makes a very comfortable living as the world's shrewdest, most inventively violent thug, and we have no reason to think he's qualified to do anything else, so maybe he should just make his peace with the life he chose or else give up and GO TO LAW SCHOOL.

Admittedly, the more we learned about Mickey (Jon Voight), the easier it became to forgive the Donovan boys their many failings; he's a multiple murderer, obviously; a scumbag, a creep, and a little too hands-on with Ray's wife and kids. And as if all that wasn't bad enough (it was), the finale brings the revelation that he knew about all his sons' sexual abuse by their parish priest -- not just Bunchy but Terry and Ray as well -- and did nothing. The Donovan boys never had a chance at happiness, and the things that may have brought them a semblance of it over the course of the season -- Terry's relationship with Frances (Brooke Smith), Bunchy's home ownership, Ray's dream of having Mickey killed -- all come to nothing in the end.

One of the darkest -- and also best -- shows on TV is ending this week, and proving with its pretty much unflaggingly high quality that a show can work well even if you can dislike many or even most of the characters as they struggle through a story that amounts to an inescapable march to their own shared doom. But that's not what Breaking Bad was when it started! If we met Walter White when he was coming to understand that he'd trapped himself in his circumstances, couldn't see a way out, had ensnared his wife in his plot, and had become pretty comfortable with the idea of killing his way out of his problems, you might not be interested in watching him continue to be miserable. But that's where we started with Ray Donovan. All the characters live in despair. No one seems to have a hope of of escape: even the kids, still in their teens, are getting caught up with people who are definitely bad for them. But more troublesome than the issue that I don't believe the story of Ray Donovan will be redemptive for anyone is the fact that I don't care.