5/5 Damages....A must see...
  by JoJo (Newport Beach, CA)
Talk about black mail, back stabbing and all of the other good stuff that goes with a great drama series. This is it!! The second season is not available yet but I have placed my order and I can hardly wait.

4/5 Moral relativism
  by H. Schneider (window seat)
I am not a TV addict. I only watch news (CNN, BBC, DWTV) and football (the real one, not the USaberration). But there are always exceptions... Like now, I am stuck at home with a cold, have to cancel a trip to avoid swine flu quarantine.
What does one do with mountains of windfall time, when one is not fit for serious pursuits? Either one reads pulp fiction, or Hegel (just joking), or one watches TV show DVDs.
This is how I ended up investing hours, that I could have used more productively, with Damages, Season 2. I never watched Season 1, which is supposed to be better, more coherent, more compact. (Watching DVDs when sick has social advantages over reading; one can more easily share the activity.)

My conclusion: if you have to waste your time, this series is not the worst of all options!
What do you get? You get a high society crime soap, focused on a female lawyer, Glenn Close, with unclear morality. You get a beautiful young colleague and co-worker of hers, a Queen Rania look alike, who bears grudges and conspires against her boss. You get the worlds of class action suits, of big capital bosses and their hobbies, of financial manipulations, of environmental crime, of corruption and betrayal... And it is highly complex and complicated and you are forgiven if you sometimes lose track of who did what when and where.

It is good on suspense. It is intriguing on the level of motivation. Some people are easy to understand, they want money and power. Our heroines here, and also some of the men, eg the William Hurt character, are harder to read.
And hardest is the moral evaluation: it is doubly vexing. Not only don't we know the facts, so we can't justly judge, but we are also shown things in differing and conflicting lights, which is of course designed to confuse us. What has actually happened and why? Who are the good guys and who the bad ones? Which moral code counts more in case of a clash?

First class entertainment with brilliant actors. Deduction of one star due to the excessive flipping about with time lines.


3/5 A Mess In Comparison to Season 1--What Happened?
  by carol irvin (United States)
Glen Close and William Hurt do their best in this mess of a second season. Whenever they are onscreen, they manage to make this overly plotted mess work. However, let anyone else onstage and I can barely figure out what is going on or care. The young woman attorney who works for Close is a big part of the problem. Her character is playing all sides against the middle. I can barely keep track of who she is plotting and conspiring with to undo Close from episode to episode. Hurt is kind of the bad guy here. I say kind of because his motivations are not all bad. Rather, he is hiding some huge secrets. I had no problem following the arc of his story line. I also had no problem following the arc of Patty's (Close) story line as she tries to win her suit against Hurt's former corporate employer yet also has to deal with her son's rebellion (seeing an older woman and refusing to go to college) and her husband's infidelity. Even Arthur Frobisher's (Ted Danson) reappearance is easy to follow, even funny, as he turns his zeal to other interests. It is the whole story line between Patty (Close) and the young woman attorney which had me completely perplexed. It was also very annoying to have this jump back and forth in time constantly. Seeing this on tv was one thing. Buying it on DVD? No way. I really enjoyed season one and did not have any problems with it. If you haven't seen it, that is the DVD to obtain.

4/5 Still Great - But not as riveting as Season 1
  by D. Dell (Oakland, CA USA)
Season 1 was taught and terrifying magic. Season 2 tries to mix in a major new storyline while still carrying forward the lethal fallout from last season's Arthur Frobisher case. Although teasing and confusing the viewer are part of the stylistic tone of this production, things got a little muddy with too many characters in mid-season. Still, the Season Finale was so brilliant, it more than paid off its mid-season markers. Meanhile, the acting of the major characters - Rose Byrne deserves more credit, IMHO - continues to shine.

4/5 MICHAEL NORI'S COME BACK!
  by Patrick Lifshitz (PARIS FRANCE)
THE SERIE IS TAKING YOU INTO THE INTRIGUES OF A PROMINENT NEW YORK LAWYER IMPERSONATED BY GLEN CLOSE
HER CHARACTER IS A WITTY,VERY SMART AND STRONG STAR OF THE NEW YORK COURT
EVERYTHING AROUND HER IS INTRIGUES MURDERS AND LUST