BuzzSugar

TV Tonight: The Damages Season Two Finale

BuzzSugar — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:30:17 -0700

I'm both relieved and dismayed that Damages ends its second season tonight. The relief comes from finally putting the pieces together - whom does Ellen shoot? what is UNR really up to? - after another breathless season of twists and flashes through time. The dismay comes from knowing it will be a year until I get to see this show again.

No show keeps me guessing quite like Damages, and after the first season, I learned to trust the writers: they delivered a finale that wrapped up a satisfying amount of loose ends and left me with something to look forward to in the next batch of episodes. I'm hoping for the same result tonight, since we already know the show will be back for a third season.

Have you been watching this season? Which characters do you think were the best additions to the cast? (I've been loving The Wire alumni Clarke Peters as Dave and John Doman as Walter Kendrick.) Which twist knocked you on the floor the most? By the way, if you're recording tonight's finale, double-check your DVR: The episode's set to run 92 minutes. For now, you can check out a preview for the episode, titled "Trust Me," if you read more.

Watch more Damages videos on AOL Video

Photo courtesy of FX

New Season of Damages Starts Tonight on FX

Sponsor — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:47:37 -0800

FX’s Damages,starring Emmy-Award Winner Glenn Close and Rose Byrne, Premieres Tonight at 10PM ET/PT. Watch this exclusive scene from the upcoming season.

Glenn Close and the Damages Crew Hint About Season Two

BuzzSugar — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:30:35 -0800

The new season of Damages starts Wednesday, and I have a feeling it's going to be good. The first three episodes are just as tense and twisty as I'd hoped, and I think untangling the web of who knows what is going to take the entire season - if not well into the next one.

Recently, the show's creators and its star, Glenn Close, hopped on a conference call with reporters to talk a bit about season two, which premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX. Here are some of the highlights:

Patty has a lot to deal with this season. "She’s been highly, highly traumatized. I think the Ray Fiske suicide spun her into a place that she’d never been before; she lost control, she put a hit out on Ellen, there’s a lot that she regrets, and you have to take that into consideration," Close said. "People do not easily recover from that, and it actually, informs, I think, the entire second year."
And get ready to see her at home. "We’re going to see much more of Patty’s personal life," creator Todd Kessler said. "Her relationship with her husband, Phil, and her relationship with her son, Michael, her relationship to Uncle Pete, who is played by Tom Aldridge, who is a man that probably she has known for longer than anyone else in her life. We’re going to explore all of that."
William Hurt's character isn't just Frobisher 2. "He enters sort of the opposite way, where he has a past with Patty and Patty actually starts the season trying to help him," creator Daniel Zelman said. "And it was important for us to have a different dynamic in that regards, but at the same time William has a lot of scenes with Glenn; a lot more scenes with Glenn than Ted had last year. And so it was even more important for us that we have an actor who really can hold his own in scenes with Glenn . . . The dynamic between his character and Patty’s character this season is quite different from the dynamic between Patty and Frobisher last year."

To hear what's coming up with Ellen and why the paranoia you feel while watching the show is a good thing, just read more.

Ellen's coming into her own, bigtime. "We have kind of realized that the first season in many ways was Ellen’s birth into the professional world and taking her up to kind of pre-adolescent, and this season we’ve come to realize it as potentially Ellen’s adolescence where she is rebelling against the parental figure or the boss in that of Patty Hewes," Todd Kessler said. "And so this season will follow a trajectory of that rebellion, and then coming out of the end of the second season, heading into the third, our desire is to explore a more kind of adult relationship between these two characters as they are functioning together."

Patty has one consistent motivation. "She really genuinely hates bullies," Zelman said. "Her compass is sort of always attuned to where the bullies are in society, and she’s always looking to stand up for the weak against the bullies. That’s something that we feel is genuine to who she is and genuine to her experience in life."
The time structure isn't going to get any less complicated. "It’s something that continually challenges us and inspires us, to work in two different timeframes," Todd Kessler said. "So what started as a way of just telling stories in the first season in a significant way has emerged as a signature to our storytelling for Damages."
Feeling paranoid? That's a good thing. "In terms of character and story, another thing that became, to us, a terrific one of our mantras is that nothing is as it seems," Glenn Kessler said. "It seems that the audience very much got on board with that. So that there was a level of paranoia, even amongst viewers as they were watching, that when they were watching people lie they suspected it and when they were watching people tell the truth they suspected them of lying . . . There were a lot of twists and turns to the story, and we kept them guessing to the end."

Photos courtesy of FX

Check Out This Spooky New Promo For Damages

BuzzSugar — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:30:57 -0800

I first saw this promo for the second season of Damages before Saturday Night Live last week, and it caught me completely off guard. It looked so slick that I assumed it had to be part of the show, and I kept waiting for it to get funny.

Around the point that Ellen steps on Patty Hewes's throat, though, I started to understand what I was actually dealing with.

This is the first promo FX has released for the new season, which premieres Jan. 7. There's no new footage, unfortunately, but we do see both Ellen (Rose Byrne) and Patty (Glenn Close), and via a voiceover we learn a bit about what's been going on with Ellen since last we saw her. Specifically, she's now fabulously wealthy and working at the right hand of Patty - but she's clearly not forgiven her boss for that attempt on her life.

It seems consistent with what I heard back at the TCA press tour about Ellen really coming into her own this season. But can anyone scare Patty Hewes? To take a look at the promo for yourself, just read more.

Photo courtesy of FX

Live From the Emmy Press Room: Glenn Close

BuzzSugar — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:14:59 -0700

Glenn Close gave one of my favorite acceptance speeches of the night when she won her Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and she was just as gracious a few moments ago in the press room.

"It really is the ride of my career," she said of playing Patty Hewes on Damages. "To have this magnificent part that is as good as any part you would find in a feature film, and to develop her and have it evolve with such an amazing ensemble of writers . . . I'm thrilled."

Close also talked about the "TV Sisterhood of Divas," the "club" she mentioned in her speech with Helen Mirren and Dame Judi Dench. "After my first movie, I was told by my first agent when I was offered something that it would actually be detrimental to my career if I did something in television, and I just couldn't figure it out," she said. "The English do it, why can't we? I really have for all those years thought of actresses like Helen Mirren and Judi Dench who have done TV series and all kinds of television movies and theater and great - as we know - roles in film. I think the most important thing is go where there's great material because that's how you grow as an artist and that's how you're challenged."

Source

Get "Damaged" With FX's Saturday Marathon

BuzzSugar — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:30:00 -0700

FX's thriller-mystery series Damages, starring Glenn Close, was one of the best entertainment-related things to come out of 2007, period. It's dark, edgy, and so well written, it succeeded in becoming another one of FX's shows (along with Nip/Tuck and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) that brings the cable channel into a whole different league. These shows have way more in common with stuff you'd see on HBO or Showtime than say, USA. In fact, as Broadcasting & Cable points out, "Damages, along with AMC’s Mad Men, became the first basic-cable drama series ever nominated in the Golden Globes Outstanding Series category."

The show won't pick up again with new episodes until 2009, but if you missed the first season last Summer, FX is reairing the entire season tomorrow, Saturday Aug. 9, starting at 7:00 a.m. To find out what I love so much about this show, read more.

Glenn Close plays ruthless litigator Patty Hewes and Rose Byrne is Ellen Parsons, Patty's young, doe-eyed employee. Together with senior associate Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan), the team is embroiled in a class-action suit against billionaire CEO Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson). Yet when murders start occurring - including the murder of someone close to Ellen - Ellen realizes the stakes are way higher than she'd originally perceived. Intricately-woven mysteries, red herrings, and crazy plot twists (like even more shocking murders) abound.

It's most fascinating to watch the dynamics of Rose Byrnes and Glenn Close's hero-villain dichotomy, partly because it's refreshing to see two female leads in a legal/crime drama. In particular, Close engages the audience in a constant push-pull; just when we think of Patty as the most evil, amoral snake imaginable, she somehow gains our sympathy - for just a moment. But that moment is enough to keep us riveted.

Photo courtesy of FX

Glenn Close and Damages Hold Court at TCA

BuzzSugar — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:30:56 -0700

The first season of FX's Damages was enthralling and chilling, and from just the couple of minutes we got to glimpse Tuesday morning at the TCA press tour, the show still has its captivating qualities. The show's main cast - including two of the three new cast members, William Hurt and Timothy Olyphant - was on hand to discuss a bit of what we'll see in the coming months, and I already feel sucked back in to the Damages universe. Some of this is spoilery, so if you don't want to know anything about season two, stop here - but if you want to hear about the new characters, the evolution of Ellen, and the fate of Arthur Frobisher (well, maybe), just read more.

First things first: Ted Danson attended the Damages panel. But does that mean Frobisher is alive? Apparently, we shouldn't go that far. The show has so many flashbacks and flash-forwards that it's hard to say exactly when and in what context we'll be seeing Danson's character. (Although, it's worth noting that FX President John Landgraf said earlier in the day that Frobisher "did survive.")

Moving on, one of the biggest changes we'll see in the new season comes is the evolution of Ellen. In the clips we watched, she's bracing and in control, telling the agents she's working with that she wants to wear a wire while Patty talks to her about the Frobisher case and telling someone (who wasn't visible in the clip) that they should be terrified. "We all wanted to approach Ellen in a very different way to make her more of a warrior in season two," Rose Byrne said. "This season she's kind of made of steel a little bit more, which is really interesting to play. The first season, the audience was so much ahead of her . . . This season, it's sort of the reverse."

Ellen is also in therapy, which is where she encounters one of the show's new characters: Wes, played by Timothy Olyphant. According to executive producer Daniel Zelman, he's "a mysterious figure who comes to be a confidant of Ellen's because they've both been through similar traumas recently. What the future of their relationship will be is something for the audience to guess at and wonder."

As for the other newcomers:

William Hurt plays Daniel Purcell, a figure who enters Patty's life in trouble - though we don't know what kind of trouble - and seeking legal aid. It seemed from the clip that his story would form the basis for this season's new case.
Marcia Gay Harden, who was not present because she'd only just been cast, will play a high-powered attorney for an unspecified company who appears to be behind some equally unspecified wrongdoing.

If you're getting the sense that there are a lot of secrets, it's true - but there's also a lot that's left to be figured out. The producers emphasized several times that they liked to keep things fluid, and all of the actors mentioned that their stories could (and did) change up until the very last minute.

As for Patty Hewes, Glenn Close says Patty seems to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as well. "She still has a lot of very unresolved issues going on that take more energy to cover up than before," she said.

A couple of other interesting tidbits:

Here's how Close described the typical reaction she got to the show's twists and turns from her family and random strangers on the street: "Tell me what's in the box - don't tell me!" They all seemed to have a huge respect for how engaging the show can be, especially Hurt, who said he stayed up till 5 a.m. watching episodes when the idea of taking the role first came up.
About those flashbacks: The show is still going to play with time; Zelman called the flash-forwards and flashbacks "a signature of the show." But he said the producers' goal this year is to make them slightly easier to grasp this year.
Throughout the session, Damages was occasionally referred to as being like a novel, with each season telling a full story. It's interesting to think about that and try to imagine what season three will look like (since FX has already committed to it). Presumably Patty and Ellen will still be around - but will anyone else?
Danson wouldn't tell us how often Frobisher will be on the show - and he insisted that's because he doesn't know.

Photos courtesy of FX and Source

Buzz News Roundup, 7/11

BuzzSugar — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:30:26 -0700

A UK production company has bought the rights to make an hour-long documentary about the "Pregnant Man" Thomas Beatie, Variety reports.
Carson Kressley will host a talk show for Lifetime, writes the Hollywood Reporter.
Some lucky Batman fans who have been following the viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight were rewarded with free tickets to a July 15 screening of the movie, ComingSoon reports.
In Orange County today? Head to the Pushing Daisies pie-eating contest at the fair! Details are at The Futon Critic.
Mario Van Peebles will return to Damages for six episodes this year, writes Reuters.
According to Variety, five major studios will include antismoking PSAs in youth-rated DVDs of films that feature tobacco use.
Billboard has the news that Starz Entertainment will help viewers make their own 3-D glasses at home for when Disney's Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour airs on Starz On Demand in 3-D.

Source

Welcome to the Writers' Room, Thanks to the New York Times

BuzzSugar — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:30:16 -0700

Earlier this year, TV writers were in the news like never before - but, unfortunately, that's because they were on strike. So, what's it like when they're working? The New York Times has given us a peek, taking us inside the rooms where the writers come up with the dramatic scenes and witty one-liners that make television so great.

The story goes inside five different writers' rooms. Awesomely, each one belongs to a favorite show of mine: Flight of the Conchords, Weeds, Damages, How I Met Your Mother, and House.

Some fun facts: The Damages room includes a rescued puppy who barks every time a page comes out of the printer. The Mother staff chomps salt-and-vinegar potato chips, while the Weeds room is a sugar-free zone. House writers actually use a whiteboard a la their title character when he's working on a diagnosis, and the Conchords spend a large portion of their day looking up old music videos on YouTube.

I was impressed by the patchwork pattern of colored index cards in the Conchords room that reportedly tracks "every idea [they've] ever had in the last six months," as well as by the fact that Weeds writers aren't allowed to have their cell phones in the room. Overall, it's a cool glimpse into a side of the writing life that we viewers don't get to see very often. Go check it out, and then tell me: What TV show do you imagine has the coolest writers' room? (I've long thought it's probably The Office.)

Source

Rewind: This Week's Buzz

BuzzSugar — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:30:48 -0700

CBS learned a big lesson this week: Britney equals ratings gold. I learned you should never mess with the fanboys of Fanboys.
The Oliver Stone Bush biopic cast is quickly filling out. I wonder who's going to play Dick Cheney? Which reminds me, all that horse-loving talk aside, I'm starting to think Kristy Lee Cook is an evil genius.
This is one of those weeks where TV news makes a lot of sense and then none at all. I can understand why there is interest in shows about escorts after the Spitzer scandal. But a show that's just people falling? Really?
More good stuff came out of the Paley Festival in Los Angeles this week, including the goods on Gossip Girl, Damages and Dirty Sexy Money.
Well it's the end of the road for the March book club, thanks to everyone for reading along! I'm really excited about April's book, The Life Before Her Eyes. I hope you can hunt down a copy for yourself this weekend and join in. And don't worry, I can confidently state the new editions of these books will never be selected.
Axl Rose, if you're listening, please finish up that that album so America can toast you with Dr. Pepper!
Can you guess which rock songs these lyrics belong to? Also, can you guess what TV show I'm recasting based on these lyrics? "What would we do, baby, without us? Sha-la-la-laaaa. . ."

Photo courtesy of CBS