| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle Tim Goodman
It's a serialized mystery that pays off your devotion. |
| 100 |
Slant Magazine Brian Holcomb
The seeds planted in the earliest episodes of the season promise a narrative as rich and complex as season one. |
| 100 |
Newsday Verne Gay
This is TV's best and brightest at the moment, and a wonderful tribute to New York's resurgent TV production industry. |
| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
One of the addictive things about Damages is its ability to work what initially seems to be a peripheral character like Olyphant's into the series' core plot in a startling way. All credit is due to the show's creators--brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman--who wrote the first two episodes with smoothly intricate plotting and bursts of melodrama that rarely spill over the top. |
| 90 |
Hollywood Reporter Ray Richmond
Forget everything I ever wrote about "Mad Men." This is the best drama series on television. |
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune Maureen Ryan
Seeing all these top-flight actors respond to the tautness and the challenges of this material--and they do get their share of emotionally charged scenes--well, it’s like Christmas. |
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times Mary McNamara
The first episode may be a bit rocky in the beginning, what with the reintroduction of characters and story lines, but the second season of Damages promises to be even better than the first. |
| 80 |
Boston Globe Matthew Gilbert
When you watch the show, which returns for season two tonight at 10, you'll find a legal thriller that's trashier and more fun than you might have expected. |
| 80 |
LA Weekly Robert Abele
This is the kind of show in which seeing new cast member Timothy Olyphant stare at Byrne from across a grief-support-group circle feels like both an act of violence and empathy, and this is before you even know who the hell he is. Since this is the secret-filled Damages, chances are we may never fully know. Would you want this knife’s-edge thriller any other way? |
| 80 |
Orlando Sentinel Hal Boedeker
The series retains its challenging, jumping-through-time storytelling. |
| 80 |
Salon Heather Havrilesky
It only takes two episodes to demonstrate that this season is going to be another wild ride, maybe even one that's a little more nuanced and unpredictable than the first. |
| 75 |
USA Today Robert Bianco
It's a smart, speedy melodrama, supported by a terrific cast and driven by a rip-roaring star. Damages is more than Close, but she's so compelling, it would be worth watching for her alone. |
| 75 |
New York Post Linda Stasi
All in all, a great good time with not one single character to like. Now, that's entertainment! |
| 70 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
The show's trademark time shifts continue, although it's initially unclear if they're connected to the season one story that carries over or to the season two plot. |
| 70 |
Variety Stuart Levine
Damages works best when it doesn't show its cards early on, so it's hard to make definitive judgments after only a handful of episodes. Predicaments and positions can often change, and seeing a character move from one end of the ethical spectrum to the other can be reinvigorating. Here's hoping there'll be a few such shifts along the way. |
| 63 |
Chicago Sun-Times Teresa Budasi
Nothing is as it seems--too much of the time. Intrigue is good; circular storytelling to the point of viewer exhaustion is bad. |
| 60 |
Newark Star-Ledger Alan Sepinwall
Toward the end of the second episode, two characters who have no business acting chummy with each other get in the back of a car together and do exactly that. And rather than make me eager to pop in my screener of the third episode (which I did, eventually), it just killed all the buzz I had built up to that point. |
| 60 |
The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
The second season has style and suspense, but it’s harder to keep viewers guessing when the characters are so familiar, and the time-scrambling format is no longer as novel. |
