“Damages,” a 13-part series that begins tonight on FX, is about the life of high-stakes litigation and nonstop power-plays in big, bad Manhattan. Like “Mad Men,” the terrific new show on AMC, it’s also the creation of a “Sopranos” alumnus — Todd A. Kessler, who cowrote the show with Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman — and it wants to bring all the power and glory of the big screen right into your living room, which, if you live in big, bad Manhattan, may double as a bedroom, but never mind. This isn’t a show about “little” people.

Fortunately, little people will be permitted to watch. “Damages” begins early in the morning with shots of the city that suggest director Allen Coulter (also of “Sopranos” fame) can’t quite decide whether to celebrate New York or maintain a critical distance. Perhaps that’s why, along with the iconic yellow cab and Empire State Building, we get billows of steam, which, as any cinematographer knows, add atmosphere at night but look sickly at dawn, and an apartment complex enmeshed in scaffolding.

Out of an elevator in an upscale condo staggers Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), a young attorney at Hewes & Associates, one of the city’s biggest law firms. Ellen’s clothes are expensive, but the rest of her is a mess: hair disheveled, face cut and bruised, hands muddied with blood. Slipping past the doorman, she darts blindly into the street and nearly gets hit by a car. We then see her at the police station, staring blankly into space. There’s nothing to identify her except a business card found in her coat that bears the name of a male lawyer. “Who the hell are you, sweetheart?” asks a female cop peering at her through one-way glass.

That’s the present tense of “Damages,” in which the damage has already been done. We then drop back six months into the past to see how it all began, and why a first-year associate at a top law firm should be sitting in a police station looking like a refugee from a horror movie.

How it all began turns out to be very much in the vein of “The Devil Wears Prada,” legal division, with Ellen as the half-eager, half-appalled ingénue learning her trade from an all-devouring female boss, Patty Hewes (Glenn Close). Patty, a legendary litigator, is both seductress and shark, she who giveth and she who taketh away, and she has at least as many moods as Shiva has arms. She also has a class-action lawsuit going against a billionaire CEO, Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), who stands accused of dumping his own stock while urging 5,000 of his employees to invest in it. It’s a battle of the titans, and Ellen has a ringside seat.

So it appears, anyway. “Damages” is a satisfyingly twisty tale about power, greed, manipulation, and lies — all the good, juicy stuff that keeps cities and dramas humming. It’s also about the world of middle-age grown ups who have conquered all before them, and the tender newcomers who stand on the threshold of that same world, tempted to kick their way in, but wondering if they have what it takes and whether they really want what’s on offer.

After an initial period of hesitation, Ellen decides that she does want in, but it takes a lot of flattery on the part of Patty and her associates, including her lieutenant, Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan), to persuade her. The question is: Why are they so keen to have her? Is she really such a brilliant prospect, as they all insist? Or is something else going on?

“You know what I like about you?” Patty tells Ellen in her flirtatious, den-mother mode. “You don’t fall for bulls—.” So why the ominous music that immediately follows this statement on the soundtrack?

The story arc in “Damages” grabs you, but the characters take longer to emerge. Initially, Ms. Close’s role seems so similar to Meryl Streeps’s in “Prada” that you just wish Ms. Streep were there to carry on. Ellen is a bore, though she’s handily outdone in that department by her boyfriend, David Connor (Noah Bean), a surgical intern who looks like a beatific, tranquilized Tom Cruise, and behaves accordingly. Presumably we’re supposed to be happy that the two are so in love and that David has presented Ellen with a really tasteful engagement ring. But they come across as a study in blah — the banality of banality. Perhaps they’re intended that way, blank slates the city will spatter with showers of grimy, vengeful ink. It would certainly help their love-making, which is so squeaky clean you can practically smell the soap suds.

Things get more interesting over Mr. Danson’s way. In fact, he and his attorney, Ray Fiske (Zeljko Ivanek),alongwithsomeunsavory characters in his employ, threaten to steal the show. Even the surnames (Fiske, Frobisher) sound spicy and suggestive compared with the bland oatmeal of Hewes, Connor, andParsons. Infact, there appears to be a country vs. city opposition in play, since Fiske is a southerner, and Frobisher, with his granite jaw, suede jackets, and joyful participation in noisy crosscountry ATV races, looks like he might find Central Park a little too manicured for his tastes.

Frobisher’s family struck it rich selling munitions during the Civil War, went broke during the Depression, and he left home at 17 to make his own fortune. When he shows off one of his great-greatgrandfather’s pistols, you can see the country’s past come alive for him. Patty, on the other hand, feels like a purely contemporary creature, a gilded Manhattan power junkie for whom the country stops at the Hudson’s edge.

Yet the two are carefully paired. “I’m a rich man, and I make no apology for that,” Frobisher tells one of his aggrieved employees whom he’s trying to win over with the offer of a $100 million settlement. Meanwhile. Patty tries to persuade Frobisher’s employees not to accept the $100 million by admitting, “You’re right. I have made a lot of money. I’m good at what I do.”

The real excitement in “Damages,” as becomes clear by the second episode, isn’t to be found among the litigants in the slick offices of Patty’s law firm, but in the defendant’s corner, which keeps getting squeezed tighter and tighter under Patty’s persistent probing. As Frobisher, the billionaire CEO who’s done something illegal and possibly heinous but doesn’t otherwise appear villainous (on the contrary, he’s far more likable than Patty), Mr. Danson turns in a brilliant performance that makes one profoundly interested in how far Frobisher will be willing to go to silence a key witness once his fortune and reputation are on the line.

No doubt the writers will make him go very far indeed, drawing us deep into that familiar American territory, where the cover-up dwarfs the original transgression, and prosecutor and prosecuted seem mirror images of each other as the actual victims get left behind.

Maybe it is a show about “little” people after all.

bbernhard@nysun.com