damian lewis

British actor Damian Lewis is a natural lead as an oddball American in NBC's "Life," which premieres tonight at 10 on Channel 7. He plays Charlie Crews, a cop who spent 12 years in jail for murder before he was exonerated by DNA evidence. Now back on the force, extremely wealthy from a settlement, Charlie is altogether loopy.


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Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts Lewis turns Crews into an amusing figure - almost as comic as Tony Shalhoub's Monk, as he pronounces Zen platitudes to no one in particular and constantly munches on fruit. In between bites of an apple, he blithely admits to anyone who'll listen that he hates cops. And he is helpless when it comes to all the technological advances that occurred while he was in jail.

But throughout all the silly quips and nonsensical exclamations, Lewis makes it subtly clear that Charlie's daffiness sits on top of a gusher of emotion. The guy spent more than a decade in prison among inmates who don't exactly take kindly to cops; we can tell that his lightheartedness is but a thin veneer. And when he's interrogating suspects, his fury clearly rears its head. Is Charlie about to go off the deep end? Lewis, with his red hair, pale face, and nonchalant expression, is compelling as he toys with Charlie's balance.

The actor, who uses a flawless American accent, makes "Life" worth a gander. And he is surrounded by a distinctive cast. Sarah Shahi, from "The L Word" and the "Sopranos" episode in which Tony ate magic mushrooms, is likable as Charlie's untrusting new partner. Robin Weigart, who was Calamity Jane on "Deadwood," exudes a strong but ambiguous presence as the lieutenant. And Adam Arkin is sweet as Charlie's former cellmate who now lives above the garage at Charlie's mansion.

And, on top of it all, the "Life" back story, which appears to involve the people who set up Charlie for the murder charge in 1994, is promising. While each episode will focus on a particular criminal case and its resolution, like most TV procedurals, the larger mystery about Charlie will unfold gradually. After one episode, I was already curious about what landed Charlie in jail. The premiere is presented partly as a documentary about Charlie, on the occasion of his release from jail, and clearly some of those featured in the reel were responsible for his incarceration.

So why do I fear that, despite all its pluses, this show is not long for the world? For one thing, as good as Lewis is, Charlie may be too strange for mainstream consumption. He's a hard character to understand, although I am certain that, ultimately, he is understandable.

And then with the TV lineups so dense with cop shows, "Life" may not have a flashy enough gimmick to attract viewers in the first place. Somehow, a show known as "the Damian Lewis vehicle" or "the kooky cop's show" does not exactly call out for an audience. Up against "CSI: NY" and "Dirty Sexy Money," the lifespan of "Life" will likely be short.

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the name of actress Robin Weigert is misspelled in the review of the NBC series "Life" in today's Living/Arts section, which was printed in advance. Also, because of an editing error, Damian Lewis is mischaracterized as a comedian in an item in the section. He is a dramatic actor.) The new gilded age, enjoyed by so few and observed by so many, is having its corollary on television not merely in new series driven to chronicle the lives of the very rich ("Gossip Girls," "Big Shots," "Dirty Sexy Money") but also less perceptively in crime shows that pay homage to the fiction of the status cop.

Joe Mantegna, who joined the cast of "Criminal Minds" after Mandy Patinkin's departure, is playing a retired agent who returns to the F.B.I.'s profiling unit in the midst of a new and celebrated career as a writer and lecturer. He has cultural capital, but on "Life," a new series that begins tonight on NBC, a Los Angeles police detective, Charlie Crews, has literal capital, enough to accommodate a mansion, a Bentley, real-estate investment and a long procession of beautiful young women gliding up and down his spiral staircase ― women for whom his lifestyle prompts no accusations of shallowness.

This seems as good a point as any to note that Charlie is played by the British actor Damian Lewis, an Old Etonian whose television credits include a role in the BBC production of "Much Ado About Nothing." There is nothing patrician about Mr. Lewis's ruddy, almost dockworker look, but he wears an aristocrat's sense of entitlement with an ease that suits his character perfectly.

Not since the death of Jerry Orbach, who as Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order" kept as firm a grip on his Greek-diner to-go cup as an Albee character to a tumbler of gin, has network television offered portrayals of law enforcers as believable soldiers of the working class. Dennis Farina, who replaced Mr. Orbach, looked as though he were born in Bensonhurst but dressed as if he kept a flat in Rome. The same type of distortion lurks on cable, where Adrian Monk, to take the most prominent example, is offered up as a genius and therapy addict, residing in a San Francisco apartment appointed as if to match the pages of a Restoration Hardware catalog. (If you have ever perused the character résumés of the field agents on "24," then you know that Jack Bauer holds a graduate degree from Berkeley and Tony Almeida one from Stanford.)

Like Monk, Charlie Crews relies on an astute facility for deductive reasoning bolstered by uncanny intuition. He has hunches, and those hunches are unfailingly right.

Charlie has come upon all of his money through a lawsuit leveled against the evil forces who sent him to life in prison for a murder he did not commit during the first chapter of his career as a police officer. The narrative structure of the show is incredibly satisfying: During each hour a crime is committed and solved, as Charlie's search for who might have framed him provides the overriding arch, satisfying our short attention spans and taste for long-form narrative at once.

Tonally, though, "Life" feels as a musical version of a Thomas Harris novel might. Tonight's episode begins with the grisly murder of a small boy and the discovery of a lopped-off finger. "Life," unlike "Monk," doesn't revel in the caper, which would pose no problem if it weren't working so hard to be quirky. Charlie's comic tic is an ambivalent relationship to Zen Buddhism, which has him making digressions like this: "I wasn't in the moment. If I'd stayed in the moment, if I'd stayed present, I would have been O.K., but I didn't. I was thinking about where we were going next, so I left the moment, just when I should have been completely in the moment, which is when people usually leave the moment, because the moment is just too much for them."

"Life," which also has Adam Arkin as a kind of all-purpose valet managing Charlie's finances from atop his garage, is in its moment as a reversal-of-fortune fantasy. Mr. Arkin's character, a former chief executive, had been to prison for insider trading, and Charlie saved his life there. In the show's equalizing vision of the world, people like Sam Waksal of ImClone end up in the same kind of penal facilities as murderers. What an implausible, piquant proposition.

Premiere week gains momentum tonight with four―count 'em, four―series premieres. And they're big'uns, too. At 9 p.m. is girl-power hour on ABC and NBC: Private Practice and Bionic Woman. And at 10 p.m. comes Peter Krause's return to series television in Dirty Sexy Money and the American network debut of Damian Lewis in Life.


By the way, if you have not yet seen Damian Lewis lead the 101st Airborne Division's Easy Company from the beaches at Normandy to the Eagle's Nest in Nazi Germany in HBO's 10-part miniseries Band of Brothers, you must go―go now. It's quite simply one of the finest stories ever put to film, due in no small part to Damian's performance as Capt. Richard Winters. You must not die without seeing it―and for all you know, you could be hit by a truck tomorrow morning, so you better get your Band of Brothers viewing in now.

However, if you've already seen Band, your opinion on these four series is welcomed in the poll and in the Comments below. Fire away.

As anyone who saw him in Band of Brothers or The Forsyte Saga can testify, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better actor or more engaging performer than Damian Lewis. It hardly seems possible having found him, a show could waste that talent and hide that charm. Somehow, Life has found a way.

The latest British import to crash on American shores, Lewis stars here as Charlie Crews, a cop wrongly convicted of murder. Free and extremely rich (thanks to a civil settlement), Charlie is now back on the force, where he expends far too much energy annoying his partner (Sarah Shahi) and, I fear, us.

Creator Rand Ravich (The Astronaut's Wife) may be going for a mix of House and Monk, but he has covered this character with so many quirks, foibles and eccentricities, you can hardly spot poor Lewis underneath. Charlie talks to himself, has a thing for fruit and has become a sort of Zen-lite master, bragging about his detachment from material goods and babbling about "staying in the moment." A little goes a long way; this much of it makes you want to flee the moment as quickly as you can.

Strip away the abrasive flourishes, and what's left is a standard-issue TV mystery with cases that are too easy to solve and internal conflicts and conspiracies that make no sense. Charlie apparently will spend his downtime trying to find who framed him, while his boss (a wasted Robin Weigert of Deadwood) does her best to get rid of him. Or at least they will for the run of Life, which really does sound like a sentence.