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I've loved Glenn Close in every role she's ever done, I think, so the fact that she speaks so highly of this part and the show's writing and working with FX, just really makes me feel good about this. She seems like she's got a good handle on the character already.

The Wall Street Journal likes it!

Damages" is a dark legal thriller set, and filmed, in New York (FX, Tuesdays, 10-11 p.m. EDT). Its crowning glory is Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, the passive-aggressive head of a high-stakes litigation firm. This season, the firm will be waging war over one major case on a battlefield far more vicious than a courtroom.
[Glenn Close]
Glenn Close as a high-powered lawyer in FX's "Damages."

Ostensibly, Patty is on the side of the angels, fighting on behalf of some 5,000 former employees who apparently were cheated out of their life savings by their boss. He's named Arthur Frobisher, and Ted Danson gives a chilling performance as a man descending ever further into evil. Yet Patty, who seems at first to be a legal version of the Meryl Streep character in "The Devil Wears Prada," is equally frightening in her way. This is no zealot whom we automatically admire for doing anything to win her case. Something is rotted in Patty's soul, too.

In the middle of this morass is new associate Ellen Parsons, played by the wide-eyed Rose Byrne. Like almost everyone in the series, she's been lured -- first by the thrill of working for famous Patty -- onto a dangerous path. Early on in her employment there are what should be warning signs that she has entered a world of duplicity and deceit. Yet the perks, such as a new Upper West Side apartment for her and her physician fiancé, are too good to resist. In this noir world, nobody remains wholly innocent for long.

We grasp that almost from the start, because the series opens in a present that follows Ellen, bloody and clothed only in underpants and a raincoat, staggering through the streets of New York. The story then flashes back to six months earlier, when she first got a job with the Hewes firm. It will take many episodes to get from then to now, and to learn exactly how and why it all went so wrong.

Knowing from the outset the key elements of the ending, which includes a grisly murder, does not spoil the thrill. Despite its fantastic nature, the story is an onion with a thousand layers, each one a satisfying mystery of its own. The only drawback is that "Damages' can't be consumed in one sitting or out of order. To feel the menace here, and follow the progression of its many characters through hell, you'll have to watch it religiously.