When Showtime’s hit series, Ray Donovan premiered in 2013, expectations weren’t high. Creator and showrunner Ann Biderman(Southland) wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel with her story about an LA fixer(Liev Schreiber) who cleans up more messes inside his own family than he does for the rich, famous and dangerous people on the West Coast. The low expectations made for a welcome invitation into a new Sunday night entertainment.

The result was a hard hitting simplistic drama that worked well because of a signature cast handpicked by Biderman to escape into this mad souls rotting away on the inside in the face of greed, violence, sickening pasts and everything else that wasn’t nailed to the floor of guilty pleasure vices. Debuting it’s third season on Sunday, July 12th, the series hasn’t skipped a beat and gotten stronger with each hour.

What makes the show tick so perfectly is the brooding, expressive and quietly powerful leading man work from Schreiber. Here is a guy who played the supporting character for decades and waited for his opportunity, just like James Gandolfini did before Tony Soprano, Jon Hamm before Don Draper, and Jeremy Piven before Ari Gold. (more…)