Damages

The Devil wears Prada. No, she doesn't. She wears sleek grey legal from Bergdorf's. And, she's not really the Father of Lies, just a very convincing facsimile.
With a blurred morality ahead of logical fallacy and a persona beyond Machiavelli, Glenn Close is Patty Hewes, the star of the best legal series to come out of the US for a long time. Probably. This one cuts Boston Legal's lawn and then some. The first episode of 'Damages' left me almost breathless and since series TV usually leaves me yawning, then, be impressed. Be very impressed. This is to the law what 'The Godfather' is to the Mafia. Close heads a firm of New York damage litigators after the biggest, sleekest fish in the financial oceans, for whom a settlement under seven figures isn't worth turning over in bed to make the phone call for. A grey-haired Ted Danson - he was once so cute in 'Three Men and a Baby' -  is Arthur Frobisher (Arthur? whose idea was that)  the mega-rich bad guy with a conscience-stricken wife, his suave joviality hidden beneath a thinly veiled menace and his dark side admirably played by his oddjob attorney Ray Fisk (Zeljko Ivanek) formerly of '24', whose thin-lipped performance almost rivals Glenn Close's. Close represents Frobisher's employees whom he has callously hung out to dry, the little people having been relieved of life savings. The lamb to the slaughter is a very smart - perhaps a little too wide-eyed - Rose Parsons, played by Ellen Parsons, constantly attempting to catch up without getting snagged on Hewes' uncanny ability to ferret out lies. The episodes mess with chronology, the endings prefiguring the beginnings leaving gaping holes in the narrative that assumes we are smart enough to realise will be stitched together in later episodes, all of which, it seems, are devoted to one single case.
85%  for episodes one and two.