Clear your evening schedule, put the cellphone on silent and get those kids to bed early; "Damages" is back, so focus, people, focus. Exhibit A in the struggling sub-genre of Shut-That-Laptop-and-Pay-Attention television, FX's fledgling drama premiered last season with a plot so convoluted you needed a crib sheet and relationship with time based, apparently, on someone's favorite acid trip.
It was terrific, of course, with Glenn Close as the seductive and duplicitous ace lawyer Patty Hewes stalking debauched CEO Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), who bilked his employees of their jobs and pensions while drawing doe-eyed neophyte Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) into a web of lies that left Ellen's fiance dead and Ellen running, half-naked and covered in blood, through the streets of New York.
Close and Danson guaranteed critical attention and "Damages" delivered; it opened big and played like a top-notch psycho-thriller feature film, only it was better because it lasted for months instead of hours. Emmy nominations all around, with Zeljko Ivanek winning best supporting actor in a drama for his portrayal of Ray Fiske, Patty's poor doomed opponent in the Frobisher case.
So how on Earth do you top, or even follow, that? By bringing back everyone involved (including, marvelously, the dead characters) and a bunch of their powerhouse friends to answer that age-old question: What do you do when you believe your boss has tried to kill you?
If the first season of "Damages" was the story of Ellen's loss of innocence, Season 2, which begins tonight, follows, in a similar stutter-step time frame, her armed-and-ready foray into the world that stole it. The first episode opens, as last season did, with Ellen in present time. But instead of looking traumatized and blood-soaked, she is clearly in charge, brandishing a highball as she addresses a mysterious someone -- Patty? The mirror? Some soon to be introduced character? -- about his or her need to be afraid.
It isn't, frankly, the eyeball grabber that last season's opening motif was, mainly because Byrne does not quite have the inner python necessary to go one-on-one with the camera, but it does make it clear that things have changed. Quite a bit.
