Tag Archives: Zeljko Ivanek

Fall 2012 Review: The Mob Doctor

2 Oct

The hardest shows to write about aren’t the worst or the best, but the most, well, blah. That’s the level of wordsmithery I’m consigned to. The Mob Doctor isn’t very good, but it’s hardly horrible.  Jordana Spiro plays a young doctor, Grace Devlin, who wants to progress in her medical career, but who is also in debt to the mob. That’s essentially the long and short of it; it’s two different shows that connect at a nexus in an attempt to put a twist on either of those genres, medical and mob, but mostly end up as a generic show that spans two genres rather than one.

Here’s the medical show: Grace is a classic doctor-who-cares-too-much who is trying to move up in the cuthroat world of surgery with a boss she doesn’t like, and who doesn’t like her, and an even higher boss that she both likes and is liked by, played my all-time blog favorite Zeljko Ivanek. She’s got a boyfriend (played by Zach Gilford, Friday Night Lights’s QB1, Matty Saracen), a rival, and angers both by her willingness to break the rules and the law to help someone out of a jam, and by her tendency to whistle blow on her boss, which makes a viewer want to yell a classic The Wire “Chain of command!”  She’s clearly good at what she does but she risks alienating her coworkers with her attitudes and her recklessness.

Here’s the mob show: Spiro agreed to take on her brother’s debt to prevent him from being gunned down by mobster Morretti (The War at Home’s Michael Rappaport). She’s also buddy buddy with allegedly retired mobster Constantine (mob character veteran William Forsythe, who just played Manny Horvitz in Boardwalk Empire), having known him since childhood.  In the first episode, Moretti threatens Grace’s family if she doesn’t kill a patient in witness protection for him.  When she doesn’t, she makes a beeline to her friend Constantine’s house.  It turns out the witness was all part of a set up to take Moretti down so Constantine can reclaim his rightful position as Head of Mob.  He offers Grace a choice; get the hell out of Dodge (Chicago) or if she decides to say, she owes him now, with unspecified mob medical favors.  She, not wanting to leave her life and family, takes the latter. So, she’s torn between the two worlds, and you’ve got what’s likely twin procedural action.  She’ll have to do a surgery for the hospital, and do a surgery for the mob, all while avoiding on stepping on many sets of toes.

Note:  Two characters got to tell Spiro alternately, “we’re done here,” and “this isn’t over,” two phrases I would kill to have a chance to properly roll off in a nautral conversation and then walk away, authoratitvely but smoothly.

Will you watch it again? Nope. Honestly, it was much more blah (that’s that non-word again) than out and out bad, but there’s so many other shows to watch that one has to make their viewing choices carefully, and affirmatively;  when choosing, it makes sense to watch shows that you excited to see the next episode of rather than shows which you finish and merely say, “you know, that really was watchable,” and mean that as a backhand compliment.

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The Zeljko Ivanek Hall of Fame

3 Aug

Mr. Zeljko Ivanek himself

This feature is dedicated to honoring the great TV actors. Some of them will be “that guys” , actors you see in an episode of Law & Order or your favorite show, and you can’t put a finger on what his or her name is, but you know you’ve seen them all over the place.  Some of them may be a bit bigger, because, after all, I want to offer equal opportunity.   Whoever I choose, though, their patron saint will be the great television actor Zeljko Ivanek, after whom this feature is named.

It would be a stretch to say that Zeljko Ivanek, a 53-year old actor from Slovenia, appeared in all of the most culturally relevant television dramas of the past ten years, but not much of one.  He got his television career underway in the 1980s, appearing in single episodes of St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law, but his TV career really took off with his recurring role as prosecuting attorney Ed Danvers in Homicide: Life on the Street in the mid-’90s.  During his time on Homicide, he guested in a season one episode of X-Files as Roland (the title of the episode as well), a seemingly mentally disabled janitor accused of killing scientists who work at the lab he cleans.  While the episode is not necessarily regarded as a classic, his performance is unsurprisingly well regarded.  He played some roles in films, and while, for an actor with less work I would spend some time discussing these films, if I didn’t edit Zeljko’s career I could go on forever.  He appeared in single episodes of Frasier, Murder She Wrote, Chicago Hope and Millennium in the second half of the ’90s.  He next worked with Homicide creator Tom Fontana on Oz, as the evil (well, Republican, so close enough) governor who appears in several episodes of the show over the years, wanting to dispense tough justice, death penalties, and possibly consider Warden Ernie Hudson for Lieutenant Governor (the warden of a jail as second in command of a state?  Yeah, I didn’t think it seemed plausible either).  During his time on Oz, he played astronaut Ken Mattingly (portrayed by Gary Sinise in Apollo 13) in the Tom Hanks and Ron Howard produced HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.

He was just getting warmed up.  He appared in Law & Order as his Homicide character, and also appeared in two other episodes 11 years apart (one in a Jim McGreevey take off as a contractor who had a gay affair with the governor of Connecticut) and a Law & Order SVU, as well as an ER, and an episode of the short-lived Dennis Leary show The Job.  He was still just getting warmed up.  He appeared in a recurring role in the first season of 24 as Andre Drazen,  the smarter of two brothers who are both sons of main season 1 villain Dennis Hopper, who Drazen and his brother manage to spring from a top security prison.  He appeared in two season 5 West Wing episodes as a staffer for temporary president Speaker of the House John Goodman.  After a CSI, an NYPD Blue (late in the series’ run) and a couple episodes of the two season James Woods show Shark, he appeared in Lost, as Juliet’s jerk of a boss who mysteriously gets run over by a bus.  He played founding father John Dickinson in HBO’s John Adams miniseries and a gun-wielding sick man who takes the ward hostage in a 2008 House episode.

Now, the offers started pouring in.  In Big Love, he plays a domineering ex-husband of Chloe Sevigny’s Nicki. In Heroes, he portrayed an evil hunter of, well, heroes for about half a season before dying.    In True Blood, he played a kind of evil Magister, a judge  amongst vampires, before dying.  In Damages, he won an Emmy for playing a bad, but not really evil, lawyer for Ted Danson’s character, before dying, by shooting himself in the head in front of Glenn Close.  He most recently starred in The Event as a surprisingly, to everyone, non-evil, presidential adviser.

This is in addition to enough work on Broadway to receive three Tony nominations (even though I haven’t been to a Broadway show in several years, I had the pleasure of seeing him in a revival of The Caine Mutiny Court Trial, for which he was nominated for a lead performance).

Sadly, with The Event’s cancellation, he is temporarily without a home.  But, not for long, I have confidence – for wherever, there is television, there will be Zejlko Ivanek.

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