Episode Four of Showtime’s new drama Ray Donovan opens with our hero staring out a pair of French doors at a snowy countryside landscape while classical music plays WHEN, WITHOUT WARNING: A reflection in the glass. It’s his dad, Mickey (Jon Voight), screwing Ray’s secretary Lena with a terrifying, wide-eyed expression and a series of grunts. (Yes, it’s as disturbing as it sounds.) The music has changed to sexy R&B. Cut to Donovan (Liev Schreiber) for a reaction shot, and his emotional spectrum—narrow to a claustrophobic degree—allows us to see a faint whiff of puzzlement. When we cut back to Mickey, the woman has changed; he’s now with Donovan’s wife, Abby. On a third shot, you only see the top of the girl’s head, but I think the girl has changed into Ray’s teenage daughter Bridget, though the camera doesn’t reveal enough to know for sure.
You know what happens next. Ray wakes up with a start, life goes on, and we’re supposed to be left with an ominous feeling that seeps into our bones for the rest of the episode. This is the kind of quasi-mystic interlude that The Sopranos did so well—a driving symbolism, eerie and effective—but when Ray Donovan attempts it, the result mimics the rest of the show. Which is to say, it’s an embarrassment. Not because the sequence itself was necessarily horrible, though it’s more garish by far than anything David Chase would’ve allowed. No, the problem is that the rest of the episode (called “Black Cadillac”) is so incredibly pedestrian, predictable and meaningless that attempting to garnish it with an artistic prologue is like placing a golden crown on the head of a beggar. It reeks of pretension to an almost comic degree.
Last week, there were hints and implications that Ray Donovan might be transitioning from the overwhelming failure of the first two episodes into something irreparably flawed, but at least mildly entertaining. “Black Cadillac” was a huge step back, and the only way I can make sense of it is to revisit the muddled plot in list form.
1. The conflict of the episode is set up immediately with—of course—a television cliche. Ray is trying to implicate his father for the murder of a priest (and fair enough, because Mickey is guilty) in order to get him sent back to prison, and the arrest is supposed to happen today. But guess what? This is also the day he and his wife are taking the kids to a sweet private school in the hopes of getting them admitted. Abby starts the episode by nagging him about work (“I asked for one day,” she screams, in what remains the world’s worst South Boston accent) and never stops. You can guess how the string plays out—in the midst of fancy private school world, replete with cartoonish villains conducting verbal class warfare in order to help us side with the Donovans, Ray repeatedly leaves important meetings, presentations and conversations in order to take business calls, while Abby becomes more and more furious.
2. Mickey, it turns out, is an FBI informant who can possibly unravel a Boston criminal network, so he’s not going to take the fall for his holy killing. This happens almost without explanation, as if real-life murder is such a minor thing that an FBI agent can just waltz into a police station and say, “by the way, you can’t arrest this guy because he might have information I need,” and the cops just throw up their hands and say, “what a world!”
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