I’m late to seeing everything these days. Sometimes I like it: I’m not jumping on the bandwagon so much as catching up to it in my own time. I don’t have the pressure to keep up with all the conversations. I get to savor the pleasure after everyone else has moved on.

Several friends had watched Damages on Netflix, but I was unsure because of the FX brand. Louie‘s one of my favorite shows, but I was skeptical of how such a male-oriented network would treat a story focused on two female leads. I ultimately started Damages on the recommendation of a friend: she and her family unintentionally stayed up all night one Christmas Eve marathoning it, so enthralled they danced around and pumped their arms whenever the theme music played. It was hard to ignore such a ringing endorsement, and to her credit, I was hooked from start to finish of the first season.

Damages focuses on the law firm of Hewes and Associates, headed by litigator Patty Hewes (Glenn Close). Hewes specializes in class action lawsuits, with the first season centered on a case against Art Frobisher (Ted Danson), a corporate playboy who destroyed his company and workers’ life savings by an alleged illegal stock sale. Frobisher’s former employees hire Hewes and Associates to try the exec in criminal court after a government trial finds him not guilty. New associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) enters the firm at pre-trial. Talented but naive, Parsons unknowingly has a special connection to the case that makes her indispensable to Hewes. Drawn too deeply into the case, caught in the machinations between Frobisher and Hewes, Parsons pays in unexpected ways that unfold over the course of the first season, starting right with the first episode.

The structure is the best part of the season. The pilot begins with a grainy, frenetic flashforward to what results from Parsons’ role in the Frobisher case. These flashforwards pop up regularly but not consistently so even their appearance keeps you guessing. They reveal a bit more each time, sometimes moving forward but sometimes showing a different perspective of a previous scene. A few flashforward moments are repeated but get more chilling with each view, especially the pilot opener: the repeated sight of just an empty building lobby and closed elevator doors, reminiscent of The Shining‘s corridor scenes, started giving me chills as I understood more about the case and more about what might be happening in those spaces.

The cat-and-mouse game between Hewes and Frobisher also propels the narrative compellingly, not only in the moves they use against each other but also in the questions they create about who’s good and who’s bad. Arguably they’re both, but who’s really the worst? Frobisher is a sociopath, a charmer who will stop at nothing not only to get what he wants, but also to try being liked in spite of it. Hewes is a prototypical antiheroine, hard to like in any obvious way: frosty and spiteful, she uses everyone around her for what she believes to be a bigger, better result to her case. She might be on the right side of the law, but do all her cruel, destructive means justify her desired ends? That question is left open as the season one finale sets up a longer series investigation.

Relatedly, many have written about the gender politics of the show. There’s a lot to mine there, and I’ll catch up with more of those readings as I continue to watch. Of course, there’s not only the male-female battle between Frobisher and Hewes, but also the female-female conflicts between Hewes and Parsons, one of the most commonly discussed parts of the show. The complications in the female relationships can’t be ignored, nor can the similarities between Hewes and Close’s other infamous ballbuster roles, especially Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. The connections are intriguing and compel further consideration. I will say that in the battle between Frobisher and Hewes, she eventually comes off as more sympathetic to me: some emotional outpourings and glimpses of a backstory reveal she might have some regrets, although the source of those regrets is left unresolved like other threads in the season one finale.

There are some other pros and a few cons to mention. I liked the pop soundtrack. It was eclectic and evocative, appearing rarely but all the more effectively for that. Donal Logue makes a particularly delightful but brief appearance as a red-pantsed Wall Street blowhard. Finally, it pays to rewatch, which is a big plus in my book. The initial meeting between Frobisher and employee “double-agent” Larry is especially chilling in retrospect.

In terms of cons, Zeljko Ivanek’s accent is atrocious. I’m from the South, and I had no idea what accent he was affecting here. My sense is that it’s meant to reflect on a later character revelation, but it’s not worth inflicting it on the entire series. Lastly, and this is admittedly minor, but there are a few character and actor changes from the pilot to the rest of the season, mostly in rather extraneous family relationships. The main reason I even noticed this (aside from the rewatch) is because Miriam Shor played Parsons’ sister in the pilot, and I’ve always like her so wanted to see more.

Lastly, it seems especially apropos to catch up on Damages during the summer of Mad Men’s finale, as the two premiered within the same mid-July week in 2007, launching what we now talk about as a revolution in basic cable programming. In fact, Mad Men beat Damages for the Best Dramatic Series Emmy for their first seasons. Anyone remember that? I love Mad Men–it’s one of the only shows I refused to time-shift–but having watched both series’ first seasons within the past year, I can honestly say I question that choice.

I can’t remember what made us decide to start in on Season 3 of Damages this past year. I watched the first and second episodes with divided attention, my phone raised and twitter list loaded to catch up on the conversations on Big Love, Lost, or Supernatural. But that state of distracted viewing didn’t last long; soon I was drawn in to this tightly woven serial mystery masquerading as a legal show. I was dually captivated by the masterful storytelling and by Glen Close’s performance of the indomitable high-stakes litigator, Patty Hewes. I was also intrigued by Martin Short and Tate Donovan, both of whom gave performances with much more subtle force than I expected. Still I found myself resistant for a few episodes to the character of the young law associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) who finds herself seemingly in above her head. There was a period of several episodes where I would actually decry out loud that I did not understand the point of her character, or see what she added to the series.

But I’d venture to say now (as I move back in time to race through the first season on Netflix) that my initial resistance to Ellen stemmed from my too low expectations of what a show like Damages might do with two female characters, one older and powerful and another slight, young, and pretty. I expected Ellen to be a weak, powerless character—or an overly idealized, character there for eye candy—because surely the series only had room to depict the journey of one strong, complex, flawed woman. And in that, I am happy to say I was very wrong. The core of Damages, to me is its depiction of the struggles of two strong, complicated professional women. (I’ll write another post on how the focus on female characters coincides with the series’ compelling and unorthodox aesthetic and narrative structure.)

Over the course of its serial, mystery narrative, Damages paints a portrait of a lifetime of edges and compromises, successes, ambivalences, and sacrifices faced by two different generations of women fighting to be powerful in the world on a daily basis. A rare moment where Patty actually talks with Ellen about her personal life highlights the show’s complexity on this front. In a single exchange—held over whiskey in the workplace—Patty warns Ellen that most men can’t handle ambitious women, and that Ellen must search to find a significant other who won’t reject her ambition; and yet this advice immediately follows Patty’s suggestion that Ellen give her fiancé the false sense that he’s in the driver’s seat.

I find this unexpected instance of relationship advice from Patty to Ellen especially notable—an overt moment in which we see the characters directly address how traditional gender roles do or don’t fit into their lives as professional women. This type of negotiation of the contradictions of lived gender politics isn’t something we see very much on television; though I’m drawn to shows that hint at it, or give it to us in incoherent moments; (Gossip Girl, NYC Prep, The Gilmore Girls, and Veronica Mars come to mind…)

But with Damages, Ellen’s and Patty’s experiences are our center. I’d even argue that Damages is more about the high stakes of relationships between women and the navigation of the public and the personal as women than it is about the larger legal proceedings and narrative mystery (as intriguing and satisfying as that may be). When all is said and done and the mystery is revealed, core questions remains: what do Ellen and Patty see in each other? Why do they need each other and/or repudiate each other? What does Damages have to say about the possibilities and limitations of female power, as different generations of powerful women collide, align, and recognize their likeness in each other?

As a critical mind though, I’m struck by somewhat overwhelming disappointment with the retro and regressive gender politics that were emphasized in what is likely to be the series as well as season conclusion. In what seems far more 1980s than 2010s, the final season has depicted Patty being unhinged by memories of the stillbirth of a daughter suffered 30 years ago as she graduated from law school (a stillbirth we learn in the last minutes of the narrative she intentionally brought on). Looking back at the series now, I realize that Damages would have been right at home amidst ’80s film narratives such as the one including Close in Fatal Attraction that demonized career women while asserting the proper place of women at the hearth in the home. While good mothers are wholly absent from Damages—and Patty’s protégé Ellen doesn’t seem likely to take this as her lesson from her time in the legal world—the show is downright regressive in its presentation of the caring capabilities of career-driven women.

I think I’m so thrown because it could have nuanced the same plot points into a compelling feminist narrative and instead—well, watch the last few minutes and see if you can see even a crack in Patty’s expression when Ellen asks her “was it worth it.” (A question that incidentally could be about 100 different things, but seems in this context to be about sacrifices of family). As many times as I watch, I’m left without much evidence other than a surface reading of Patty’s overwhelming regret of her role in the stillbirth and the erasure of the considerable good her work did taking on and bringing down duplicitous captains of industry (an obviously simplified analysis).

I know I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the politics of containment of the many narrative threads regarding career success and family for women. It is a reminder that otherwise sophisticated narrative and visual style does not necessarily bring with it a progressive politic. I think I’m somewhat stunned as well by the bald openness and simplicity with which the show ultimately treated the topic when its portrayal of corporate malfeasance was detailed, contradictory, and carefully constructed. Maybe I should feel this way more often, but I’m left deeply disappointed in my memory of Damages.