In addition to that phenomenal looking cast, they're also apparently adding Clarke Peters and John Doman from "The Wire".

Seeing that was almost enough to make me order the DVDs straight up, but one of the few TV critics I bother to read trashed the shit out of it (in between talking about how great other parts of it are)(http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/01/sepinwall_on_tv_damages_season.html)

"With each episode, creators Todd and Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zieman want to make your jaw drop at least once or twice, to make you question everything that you've seen to that point, to make damn sure you're going to clear your calendar for next week's episode so that you can find out how the latest shocking twist makes sense. In that way, they're not too different from pot-boiler novelists like John Grisham and Dan Brown, whose books don't have to be deep, or even good, so long as they make you keep turning the page to find out what happens next.

And that approach has its place, absolutely. ("The Da Vinci Code" once helped get me through a very bad delay on the Newark tarmac.) But it's one that gets tiresome after a while. If everything's surprising, then eventually nothing is. Zieman and the Kessler brothers admittedly make up much of the story as they go along and try to make sense of the twists after the fact, but that defeats the point of trying to play along with the mystery at home. If the writers and actors don't know who's doing what and why, then you can interpret any scene any way and it won't matter.

...

That one moment reminded me that "Damages" is a show that doesn't play fair, doesn't really make sense and is built on an ever-shifting foundation. And while that can be fun when you're trapped on an airplane, or lounging under a beach umbrella, or in a movie theater for two hours, it gets tiring when applied to an episodic TV show, week after week, season after season."

Off base?

I think it is way off base. Two comments:

First, I find it incredibly tiresome for people to complain when writers "make it up as they go along." No. Shit. Scripts are not handed down to writers from heaven. It is just as much fun to play along whether the writers know where it is going and you don't, or nobody knows where it is going. All I care is that the destination is satisfying, and you absolutely cannot complain about the conclusion of the first season of Damages. If you had asked me, I would have thought that Damages was conceived as one long master narrative - the show always FEELS like it knows exactly where it was going.

And second, the complaint that it doesn't make sense is BS. (Mild spoiler ahead) The ever shifting foundation is because the writer's are really good at pulling the rug out from under you. One episode, they show you a flash of the present that makes it look like Rose Byrne killed her fiance (she's holding the murder weapon over his body!). Then, the next episode, you see a little more that reveals the previous shot didn't mean what you thought it meant (oh, she found it in the other room, picked it up, and carried it with her when she found him). That's a small example, sure, but that is the kind of game this show plays on a larger scale.

The show is a little pulpy and melodramatic, but that can be alot of fun when done as well as it is here. That one TV critic you bother to read sucks.

Sounds good then, I'll have something new to binge on after Dexter. I tend to take the tack that as long as the plot works I don't care whether they're making it up as they go along. Heroes and 24 do it, but then again the best mystery on TV (Twin Peaks) did it too.

PS, last night's premiere: awesome. Very much looking forward to this season. William Hurt is off the charts so far.