The series debut of Fox’s Rake does its best to establish L.A. lawyer Keegan Deane’s bona fides as the ladykiller of the title, with Deane in the opening managing to seduce a one-night stand between a beating from a bookie’s muscle and sitting in on a late-night, high-stakes poker game. Later he brings the woman back to his best friend’s house, where he’s been crashing for months too long, and drinks all his pal’s best Scotch. Soon his car is towed, and the kids in his charge are hauled off to child services…in short, he’s irresponsible, self-centered and reckless. But for all that, the term “rake” seems a bit aggressive for what Keegan Deane is. He’s more a charmer than suave player, more of a boyish goof than a lothario.
Watching Greg Kinnear as Deane play poker to try to pay off his $59,000 debt while his lady friend sleeps in the background brings to mind a quote from another committed screw-up. In Rounders, Edward Norton’s nightcrawling, deadbeat Worm has the nerve to tell Matt Damon’s Mike, “In the poker game of life, women are the rake.” In the gamble that is Deane’s day-to-day existence, where the poker is about the only risk that turns out well, he knows that the women in his life aren’t to blame. His multitude of problems, both professional and personal, are of his own making. But his chances for redemption—and for the series to find an audience—may well turn on how much women take to this amiable rogue. It’s no accident that Kee’s winning poker hand is queens full.
Trying to create a bad-boy appeal for the character without turning him into a jackass is a difficult trick, and it may be why the show pulls its punches on his outrageous behavior. He has sex with his pick-up back at his friend’s house, but we don’t see them in the son’s bed together. Kee has an addictive personality, but drugs don’t seem to enter the picture. Even his drinking leaves him little the worse for wear. Without those transgressions on full display, Kee’s edge softens. More vexingly, Kinnear doesn’t hint much at Deane’s driving demons; without that sense of danger, the show may work better as comedy than as drama. And Kinnear does have good timing—he consistently feels funny, even if there aren’t a ton of laughs in this episode.
Rake plays off the formula of Fox’s long-running hit House, with a troubled central figure fascinating for his flaws and saved by his brilliance. But Deane at first viewing is neither as smart nor as much of a lunatic as House, and in any case, the Hugh Laurie character Kee more closely resembles is Bertie Wooster in the old Jeeves & Wooster series: an addled but good-natured bon vivant and reluctant solver of problems, more feckless than devil-may-care.