Aiming to outdo HBO’s recent recruiting of Alan Alda with their own unconventional ’70s sex symbols, Showtime has drafted both Elliott Gould and Jon Voight to join the cast of the upcoming Ray Donovan, which stars modern-day “thinking woman’s sex symbol” Liev Schreiber. Indeed, there will be a whole lot of thinking women thinking, “As a thinking woman, I regard these men as a symbol of sexy things and feelings.” Anyway, as previously reported, the show stars Schreiber in the very au courant role of (in the words of the press release) a “professional troubleshooter” to an elite clientele, but it promises to be less glibly awful about it than the similar-sounding House Of Lies.
For one thing, it’s explicitly a drama—evident in the relationship between Schreiber and his ex-con father, played by Voight, who complicates his life by trying to reconnect while hiding a secret agenda. No doubt helping him through all of that will be Gould as Schreiber’s surrogate father figure and mentor, a powerful lawyer with the very Elliott Gould-sounding character name of “Ezra Goodman” (because "Jewish Lawyerstein" was deemed too on-the-nose). The show will mark the first recurring TV roles for Voight and Gould since their respective failed series Lone Star and The Cape. Wait, did we already know Elliott Gould was in The Cape? Did he play The Cape? And if so, why isn’t it still on the air?