Product Details

• Actors: Glenn Close
• Format: AC-3, Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Subtitles: Spanish
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 3
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Sony
• DVD Release Date: January 19, 2010
• Run Time: 504 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001NXDIMK
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,015 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Damages: The Complete Second Season" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

With the second season of the legal thriller Damages, the creators, writers, cast, and crew have accomplished a minor miracle by producing 13 episodes that match--and, at times, surpass--the level of nail-biting drama and suspense that made the show's freshman season one of the best in 21st-century television. The core cast is back for this round--which is something of a surprise, given that novice lawyer Rose Byrne is convinced that her legal-eagle boss (Glenn Close) is responsible for the murder of her fiancé. The story neatly weaves together a murder mystery involving an old flame (William Hurt) of Close's, Byrne's collaboration with federal agents (led by Mario Van Peebles, who also directs the season's fourth episode, "Hey! Mr. Pibb!"), and Hurt's involvement in an environmental scandal that implicates a major corporation. The threads come together in impressive fashion, and the quality of the writing and direction is matched at every turn by the cast, which also includes Marcia Gay Harden as Close's opposing council; Tate Donovan as Byrne's saintly confidante; Ted Danson, who reprises his winning turn as disgraced billionaire Arthur Frobisher; Saturday Night Live's Darrell Hammond as an unnerving killer; and a trio of HBO vets--Deadwood's Timothy Olyphant and The Wire's John Dornan and Clarke Peters--as a shady love interest for Byrne and a pair of malevolent corporate apparatchiks. If the third season of Damages achieves the level of quality of season 2 and its predecessor, it will be the neatest hat trick on TV since The Sopranos.

The three-disc set of Damages' second season features a healthy selection of extras for series devotees to enjoy. Writers and creators Glenn Dessler, Daniel Zelman, and Todd Kessler are featured on commentary tracks for four episodes, and they're joined by members of the cast on each: Byrne (who may surprise some with her Australian accent) and a wry Olyphant on season opener "I Lied, Too"; Danson on "They Had to Tweeze That Out of My Kidney"; Donovan on "Look What He Dug Up This Time"; and Close on "Trust Me." The creative team is also front and center for Season Two: Post Mortem, which is informative for those wondering how the producers and writers work with the show's nonlinear format; the cast is the focal point for Character Profiles, which features short bios and chats with the main players. A battery of deleted scenes round out the set's supplemental features. --Paul Gaita

Product Description

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 01/19/2010 Run time: 583 minutes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still Great - But not as riveting as Season 1, July 20, 2009

By 

D. Dell (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Damages: The Complete Second Season (DVD)

Season 1 was taught and terrifying magic. Season 2 tries to mix in a major new storyline while still carrying forward the lethal fallout from last season's Arthur Frobisher case. Although teasing and confusing the viewer are part of the stylistic tone of this production, things got a little muddy with too many characters in mid-season. Still, the Season Finale was so brilliant, it more than paid off its mid-season markers. Meanhile, the acting of the major characters - Rose Byrne deserves more credit, IMHO - continues to shine.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes Less Is More, January 25, 2010

By 

J. McQueen "Anti-Charisma" (Hartford, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Damages: The Complete Second Season (DVD)

The first season of "Damages" was brilliant.

The second season was very good as well. But, it seems to be missing something.

Upon reflection, I believe the missing ingredient was villians who were just as compelling as the "heroes."

In Season 1, the series benefitted greatly from Ted Danson's portrayal of the wayward billionaire Arthur Frobisher. Danson's Frobisher was equal parts "average joe made good" and inaccessible, plutocratic jerk; the rare character who you find yourself both repulsed by and rooting for. (This combination made him a yin to Patty Hewes's yang.)

There are no "villians" who the viewers can identify with in the 2nd season. The primary antagonist in this installment was an industrialist who would not acknowledge the illegal dumping of hazardous waste because he would "have his company taken away from him" if he did. There's nothing nuanced, complicated or vaguely sympathetic about that.

Glenn Close once again turns in an Emmy-worthy performance as a "Race Horse Haynes" -esque class-action litigator, Patty Hewes. She's worth the price of the dvd set by herself.

This season kept my attention and was entertaining from beginning to end. But, the first season was virtually perfect and thus, this season which certainly fell short of that, suffers in comparison.

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moral relativism, October 31, 2009

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Damages: The Complete Second Season (DVD)

I am not a TV addict. I only watch news (CNN, BBC, DWTV) and football (the real one, not the USaberration). But there are always exceptions... Like now, I am stuck at home with a cold, have to cancel a trip to avoid swine flu quarantine.
What does one do with mountains of windfall time, when one is not fit for serious pursuits? Either one reads pulp fiction, or Hegel (just joking), or one watches TV show DVDs.
This is how I ended up investing hours, that I could have used more productively, with Damages, Season 2. I never watched Season 1, which is supposed to be better, more coherent, more compact. (Watching DVDs when sick has social advantages over reading; one can more easily share the activity.)

My conclusion: if you have to waste your time, this series is not the worst of all options!
What do you get? You get a high society crime soap, focused on a female lawyer, Glenn Close, with unclear morality. You get a beautiful young colleague and co-worker of hers, a Queen Rania look alike, who bears grudges and conspires against her boss. You get the worlds of class action suits, of big capital bosses and their hobbies, of financial manipulations, of environmental crime, of corruption and betrayal... And it is highly complex and complicated and you are forgiven if you sometimes lose track of who did what when and where.

It is good on suspense. It is intriguing on the level of motivation. Some people are easy to understand, they want money and power. Our heroines here, and also some of the men, eg the William Hurt character, are harder to read.
And hardest is the moral evaluation: it is doubly vexing. Not only don't we know the facts, so we can't justly judge, but we are also shown things in differing and conflicting lights, which is of course designed to confuse us. What has actually happened and why? Who are the good guys and who the bad ones? Which moral code counts more in case of a clash?

First class entertainment with brilliant actors. Deduction of one star due to the excessive flipping about with time lines.