"Damages": When good shows get bad ratings

(Above: A 10-minute catcher-upper on the season of "Damages." For a slightly less frenetic version, a 12-hour marathon begins at 7 a.m. CT Saturday on FX.)

Two years ago, FX took a huge gamble by staging a war drama set in present-day Iraq. “Over There” depicted combat at its most depersonalized and nihilistic, with storylines ripped from the real Mess O' Potamia. Steven Bochco, the “NYPD Blue” producer, wanted to put a war most Americans seemed eager to forget back into their living rooms as fictional fact.

  Critics loved “Over There,” even some pro-war ones. But the public clicked away. When FX chief John Landgraf killed the show, the outcry from military families was so great that he felt compelled to send out an apologetic press release and a research memo showing that fewer than 900,000 people watched the season finale. Many fans poured out their sorrow on my website. “This show allowed us with children 'over there' to somehow understand what they are going through,” wrote one upset mom. “It made me feel like I was still with my army buddies,” a vet said.

  The reason I bring up this bit of ancient history is because it's déjà vu all over again. Once again, FX has helped lovers of great, challenging TV make it through a long, hot summer with another brilliant program. And once again, barring some ratings miracle, FX may have to put a bullet through it.

  Its name is “Damages,” and it airs its season finale at 9 p.m. Tuesday on FX. It's one of the most masterfully produced things I've seen in a long time. On its face, “Damages” is a legal whodunit starring Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, the conniving, self-righteous head of a law firm devoted to defending the underdog, like the 5,000 employees heartlessly cast out of work by their owner, billionaire cokehead Art Frobisher (Ted Danson).

  Sounds like a “Law & Order” episode so far, but about half an hour into the first episode “Damages” took a hard right around a corner, and we've been chasing after it ever since. Patty, we soon discovered, was no saint. Secrecy and duplicity reigned at Hewes & Associates, leading us to wonder if Patty really had the interests of her clients at heart. Her aggressive recruitment of a promising young lawyer, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), just so Patty could get at Ellen's friend Katie (Anastasia Griffith), was pathological. And then there's Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan), the lawyer charged with carrying out Patty's psychological dirty work, charmingly mind-melding Ellen into doing exactly what the boss wants her to.

  All of this could have unfolded sequentially, but the beauty of “Damages” is that, like Patty herself, it has kept its secrets close to the chest. Its writers took a season-long story arc and chopped it up like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces we kept picking up, over and over, trying to figure out how they fit together. Over here, the Frobisher case. Over there, six months in the future, a grisly scene in Ellen apartment, her fiancé David lying dead in a pool of blood, Ellen wandering out of the apartment disheveled and disoriented. Slowly, over the season, the picture came together -- why, and by whom, David died, and what this had to do with Ellen, Patty and Frobisher.

  “Damages” skillfully moved back and forth, revealing little details from the two stories in ways that intrigued rather than bewildered the patient viewer. All the while it kept pushing toward the climactic two-part conclusion, the first of which aired last week (and reairs at 9 p.m. tonight on FX). Somehow, through all the scheming, our initial impression of Patty as a champion for justice against a corporate evildoer was never entirely wiped away, a testimony as much to Close's acting as the writing on “Damages.”

  “Damages” is the show, I think, that many critics were hoping “John from Cincinnati” on HBO would become: an intricate guessing game that's fun to follow even if it doesn't all quite add up. I remembered first seeing the blood on Patty's shoe, so when the source of the spatter came up weeks later, I felt a little pleased with myself, even if it was a pretty grim discovery.

  But maybe that scene served as a microcosm for what ails “Damages”: With its dark storytelling, its female antihero and its nonlinear narrative, it practically double-dared the viewer to keep watching. When I checked the ratings about halfway through the season, “Damages” ranked 14th among summer cable series. That sounds better than it was. “Damages” was just ahead of Bravo's “Top Chef” and just behind MTV's “The Hills,” a couple of cheap reality shows that didn't need high ratings to pay for high-priced talent. The summer's big scripted hits were drawing about a million more viewers, shows like “Burn Notice,” an entertaining but undemanding spy diversion on USA. In recent weeks, I'm told ratings for “Damages” have continued to slip.

  TV Guide's Michael Ausiello wrote an item two weeks ago that a source had told him “Damages” was renewed despite the low numbers. As of this writing, though, that's still unconfirmed. Whatever FX decides, it's going to be a close call. Because while it likes to be known as the “HBO of basic cable,” HBO doesn't sell to advertisers. FX does, and as its executives learned two summers ago, they won't sponsor shows people aren't watching.