Ray Donovan is the new series Showtime is going to be pairing with the last season of Dexter. The pilot is youtube. It’s the billionth cable show since The Sopranos to feature a white guy trying to hold his family together while dealing with a high-stress career and his own self-destructive nature. Liev Schrieber plays the title character, who fixes problems for famous people (like waking up next to a dead girl). His father, Jon Voight, is some kind of criminal asshole, and the rest of his family is messed up in somewhat novel ways. Normally, the sibling who makes the protagonist’s life hell is an alcoholic or bipolar or has a gambling problem, here, one was molested by a priest as a kid, another was a boxer and they say he has Parkinson’s as a result but I think it’s just boxer’s dementia, I don’t think you actually get Parkinson’s from boxing. Muhammad Ali’s just a coincidence, I think.

Anyway, the plot was fairly predictable, the characters not very interesting, and the brief nudity in the show is incredibly gratuitous (and not even hot, as it was a dead girl). The whole fixer of celebrity problems is a great concept, what with the ability to tell stories every week about good looking people doing terrible things, and the ability to parody real-life celebrity scandal. But the execution in the pilot is pretty uninteresting. Not a lot to like here.