FX ready for another Close-up (and who can blame them?)

Three years ago, Glenn Close agreed to appear in a TV series for the first time. It was for one season of FX's “The Shield,” playing the captain of an unruly inner-city LAPD precinct, in a role endowed with both guts and smarts. She was the only higher-up who ever was able to read the troublesome rogue cop Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) like a book.

  That tour of duty convinced Close to take the plunge again with FX -- and this time, there's no expiration date on her availability. “Damages,” a new series beginning 9 p.m. CT Tuesday on FX, puts Close front and center in a TV series, another first (though one can't entirely overlook the trio of “Sarah Plain and Tall” movies she starred in for the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” in the 1990s).

“I had such a wonderful time working for FX,” Close told a gathering of TV critics at press tour earlier this month. “I love that they explore the gray areas of life, and they take big risks. And I said I would love if they ever came up with a great idea of doing something in New York.” That's where the 60-year-old actress lives and prefers to work.

No argument that the idea behind “Damages” was promising: Powerful female lawyer who takes on corporate evildoers, but has plenty of skeletons rattling in her own closet. I've seen two episodes and I think the show is still finding its way, but it has potential to be one of the most talked-about new shows of the year.

Nor is there much debate that Close lends just the right amount of star power to ensure "Damages" gets the kind of head-turning attention that has rightly earned comparisons between FX and its spendier pay-network competitor HBO.

Close plays Patty Hewes, head of her own law firm, a driven, self-styled defender of the people against the powerful monied interests -- or so, at first glance, it appears. As we join the show, Hewes is pursuing a class-action suit against Art Frobisher (Ted Danson), CEO of a large company that tanked, putting thousands out of work. Just in case the Enron comparisons weren't obvious, Frobisher is also experiencing midlife angst and takes on extreme sports to compensate, a la Jeffrey Skilling.

“Damages” opens, though, with a spunky, wide-eyed young attorney, Ellen (played by Rose Byrne), being courted for a job in Patty's firm. She's a blank slate onto whom the namesake of Hewes Law can impose her will personality. It's in her interactions with Ellen that Patty reveals a less-than-heroic side -- one who sacrifices family and friendship for career, and more troubling, one who may have designs for her protégé that are not in her best interest.

Close said that one of the pleasures of doing “Damages” was the research. “I had a wonderful time talking to some very high-powered, successful female lawyers in New York and to just kind of ask very specific questions, because for me the whole interest was the gender, that this person was a woman at the head of her own law firm in a very, very high-powered male-dominated world.” Among those she got to know was Mary Jo White, former U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, who amused Close by insisting, “I'm not ambitious, I'm competitive.”

But “Damages” is, in fact, an exploration of ambition and the unseemly effects it can have on people. At times, Patty's ambition (she uses the word twice in the first hour) threatens to overwhelm her prosecution of Frobisher and makes you wonder if the billionaire might not be the victim here.

“What really motivated us to write about this world, first and foremost, was our interest in power dynamics,” said Daniel Zelman, who created and runs the show with Glenn and Todd Kessler. “Whether you're on the 'good side' or the 'bad side,' power becomes a tremendous burden and will tend to force people to do compromising things. And so we're just interested in seeing how far we can push these characters.”

They don't waste time, either. In the second hour a warm, fuzzy animal winds up dead, and it's not clear that Patty isn't involved. Even if she's not, many critics here couldn't help but think of Close's most infamous scene in “Fatal Attraction” 20 years ago, where she boiled a bunny. When somebody brought up the comparison, Close laughed uproariously.  Ever the actor, she knew how to deliver an unscripted, if entirely appropriate response to a question she was too smart not to have anticipated.