‘Ray Donovan’ Premiere Recap: Rays Fixes Hollywood While Home Life's In Shambles

Ray Donanvan, Showtime’s newest series, stars Liev Shreiber as a Hollywood fixer with a dark family history, a family of his own – unhappily transplanted from Boston �– and adulterous ways. The series premiere, “The Bag or the Bat,” dealt with all of these issues and more.

Ray’s father Mickey (Jon Voight) gets released from a Massachusetts federal prison on parole and goes straight to church. Instead of praying, he goes to the rectory and finds a priest in his bedroom. He whips out a gun, shoves the barrel in the priests mouth, says, “How’s it feel? You like it?” and pulls the trigger.

Meanwhile, Ray is sleeping in Calabasas, Calif., when his cellphone rings. A basketball player client of his just woke up in a hotel room next to the girl he went back with the night before who's now dead. The young man just signed a multi-million dollar endorsement deal and can’t get caught in the ordeal. Ray calls a couple of his guys to clean up the mess and calm the frazzled athlete down, while Ray starts the day of with his family. His wife Abby (Paula Malcomson) wants their daughter to get into private school, and badgers him about it as he gets out of bed. She also shows them that their son has been getting into fights, as evidenced by his fresh black eye. Breakfast chatter also reveals that one of his brothers has Parkinson’s and his other brother was molested by a priest in his youth.

Before Ray heads to the hotel with the overdosed girl, he responds to another call for help. When he gets to the office of a Hollywood lawyer, he finds a distraught young male actor who was caught with a male prostitute, which will no doubt spark rumors about his sexuality. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, Ray swaps out the football player with the actor at the scene of the drug overdose death of the naked young woman.

Ray’s next stop is to Stu's (Josh Pais), a married movie producer with a girlfriend on the side who he wants Ray to follow to make sure that she doesn’t have anyone on the side. When Ray gets to her beachside home, he spots a stalker watching her do yoga. Ray decides to ignore his client’s wishes to not let the girlfriend know he’s having her watched to tell her she has a stalker. As it turns out, Ray used to work with her when she was a Disney star. They start to make out on the couch, and when Ray picks her up to take her to the bedroom she starts to have a seizure. Once she’s all right, Ray takes his leave. He later heads to the stalker's place and offers him what’s in the bag or the bat (hence the episode's title). The stalker chooses the bag, so Ray proceeds to dye him a dark shade of green from head to toe.

Meanwhile, Ray’s brother Bunchy, (Dash Mihok) who had been sexually assaulted by a priest as boy, is a recovering alcoholic. He falls off the wagon when he receives the settlement from the church for the abuse. He ends up getting into a drunken bar fight and his brother Terry (Eddy Marsan) helps him fend off the other guys in the bar. Ray ends up bailing them both out of jail. Terry and Bunchy decide it’s time to tell Ray that they have a biracial brother that their dad fathered with a black girlfriend, and that their father is now out of jail.

Ray’s problems are just beginning though. Ezra (Elliot Gould) declares that they both need to come clean about all of the sketchy fixes they’ve done through the years while at his wife’s memorial. The young actress seeks out Ray’s wife at her yoga class, and is at his house when he gets home. It should scare him off, but he lets her unzip his pants and pulls over for a quickie before dropping her off. His wife tells him not to come home. When he comes home the next day, he tells his wife he didn’t sleep with the girl and they go to a party. At the party, Stu tells Ray’s wife her husband is sleeping with his girlfriend, so Ray breaks Stu’s wrist.

Back at home, Ray continues to defend himself to his wife. Before he’s absolved, he claims they have bigger things to worry about anyway in the form of his father Mickey. Ray’s convinced his father will come to the house soon, and tells Abby, “Whatever you think happened, it was ten times worse. Don’t let the wolf in the gate, Abby.” Little does Ray know, she’s been keeping in contact with Mickey while he’s in jail. When Ray goes to meet Mickey at his brother’s boxing gym, they get into a heated argument about the “past.” It’s never made clear what happened, but while Ray is giving the repeat offender stalker a beat down, his wife his receiving Mickey into their home.

Ray Donovan airs Sundays on Showtime at 10/9c.

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