‘Damages,”Call Girl’ trying to erase past mistakes

Celebrity litigator Patty Hewes and high-end escort Hannah Baxter don't have much in common.

Both charge an obscene amount of money, by the hour, for their services, and their shows -- "Damages" (10 p.m. Monday, FX) and "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" (10 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- are coming off disappointing second seasons.

But they're opposite sides of the feminism coin: Hannah supports herself by exploiting her sexuality, while Patty does it by suppressing hers.

Or something like that. I mostly slept through my women's studies class after realizing we wouldn't be studying actual women. (And don't even get me started on what I thought was going to be a semester of studying a broad.)

But the biggest difference between the two: Only one makes your boy parts curl up inside you for protection.

That would be Glenn Close's Patty Hewes, who's so icily cutthroat, so devoid of human emotion, she makes Alex Forrest -- Close's bunny-boiling "Fatal Attraction" character who made a generation of men think twice before cheating on their wives -- seem like a real catch.

This season, Patty has been tasked with recovering billions of dollars lost in a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme while her protege/adversary, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), works with the prosecution as part of the district attorney's office.

The early highlights include two comedy icons playing against type: Lily Tomlin as the embezzler's wife and Martin Short as the family's slimy lawyer. Short, in particular, is a revelation and far more effective than his fellow "Saturday Night Live" alum Darrell Hammond, who played a hired killer last season, but mostly came off as creepy and weird.

That was just one of several problems with last year's episodes, which didn't really feel like they got going until week nine or 10. And I still can't tell you what they were about. But while "Damages" continues to bounce around through time more than this past season of "Lost," it at least seems, based on the first two episodes, to have a better idea of where it's going.

There's no mystery as to where "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" ends up, though, as Showtime made the entire season available to critics.

With eight episodes lasting about 20 minutes each, the whole thing flies by at roughly the speed of "Avatar." And, like those lunatics who've experienced severe depression after seeing the James Cameron epic -- they're apparently devastated that they can't live somewhere as beautiful as the movie's utopian Pandora -- I'm a little bummed because I don't live in a world where my best friend is a charming, quick-witted sex worker, dripping with sensuality, who's also a gifted writer.

As the third season kicks off, Billie Piper's Hannah -- technically her working-girl alter ego, Belle -- has become a literary sensation thanks to her eye-opening memoir. But that's been pushed back to Feb. 1 so Showtime can air a 30-minute sit-down between Piper and Brooke Magnanti, the escort-turned-neuroscientist (seriously) whose memoirs, penned under the name Belle de Jour, inspired the series.

In the season's first actual episode, "Call Girl" wastes little time making up for last year's downer that tried to cover for Piper's pregnancy with oversized T-shirts, baggy sweaters, the occasional body double and too much introspection. Within seconds, Hannah/Belle is power-strutting down a hotel hallway in a skintight dress, hips pounding from side to side to the point they should be knocking over bellhops and sending housekeeping carts flying.

As for a story arc, Hannah's editor/love interest convinces her to rush out another book, something she questions almost immediately. "If I'm going to write a second book," she realizes, "I'm going to have to do some serious whoring." And as she breaks into a naughty grin, the ghosts of last season are quickly exorcised, paving the way for a new burst of fun.

In its early episodes, "Call Girl" had a certain "Sex in the City" quality. But this year, Hannah pretty much becomes a London-based Carrie Bradshaw as she hurries home to her laptop to reflect on her latest escapades, which have become even more outlandish in order to sell books.

There's the client, an uptight actuary, who makes her bleat like a sheep. And she wraps her kitchen in plastic like one of Dexter Morgan's kill sites for a little sploshing -- food play that takes the "American Pie" dessert scene to new depths.

Then there's her trip to a fetish club, where the patrons look like they escaped from "Blade Runner," a David Lynch movie or a "Project Runway" challenge gone bad. Not to mention the sex toys that seemingly came from Home Depot.

The fact that the scenes are played for laughs doesn't mean they aren't traumatizing.

But they're still less frightening than Patty Hewes.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.