They say good things come to those who wait. “Ray Donovan” fans know this very well in 2021. 

Earlier this month, Liev Schreiber, title star and producer of the series, announced on Instagram that “Donofans,” the nickname given to the hardcore fans of the Showtime drama, were getting their wish. After an anti-climatic series finale two years ago, the network announced they were cancelling the series, denying Schreiber and showrunner David Hollander a fitting finish to their story of the tortured fixer who cracked skulls in California for the first few seasons of the show, before the story shifted to New York.

I did my own campaigning for the show’s return,  because I believe every creator of a series deserves the same right as a director of a movie: the right to finish what they started. The eldest of three troubled brothers (the others played by Eddie Marsan and Dash Mihok) and a departed sister, Ray builds his own cells of remorse over the course of seven seasons, years that saw the show shift from a regular tough guy fixing problems tale to something more-a series that talked about child abuse in the church and trying to run from a predetermined fate. 

Schreiber, whose mother is Jewish, anchors the tale throughout and does it after axing a lot of his own lines. What actor deletes his own lines? Schreiber, whose role as a producer allows him to make Ray a man of few words, doesn’t need a lot of dialogue to get a message across. It’s a trait that the Shakespeare-trained thespian has used to steal scenes in high-profile films like “Spotlight” and own others such as “Chuck.” He’s a performer who can inhabit any sort of role and it doesn’t matter if he has a quarter of the time to do it. 

It’s a characteristic that serves the show well, with the ensemble cast all sharing their own pain and talent. Marsan sinks himself into Terry Donovan, a former fighter with Parkinson’s Disease who runs a boxing gym, but feels the urge to stick around fading. Mihok’s Bunchy is a classic case of a young life halted inside a church and cemented in his resulting teens as a broken man. Paula Malcolmson, who plays strong women who can deconstruct a domineering man in her sleep, is Ray’s wife, and Kerris Dorsey (she was great as Brad Pitt’s daughter in “Moneyball”) plays his daughter. All the Donovans feel their own measures and alternate blends of pain, and Hollander dials that tension up during each season. 

The last time we saw Ray, he was digging a ditch in the woods, covering up his latest mistake or encounter. If you combined George Clooney’s problem-solver from “Michael Clayton” with Jonathan Banks’ Mike from “Breaking Bad,” you’d have Schreiber’s anti-hero. Dressed for a funeral and trusting a baseball bat more than a weapon most of the time, he’s a man apart. That makes for an intoxicating watch for Donofans. 

They made their voices heard loud enough that Showtime decided to rethink their plan. Instead of that lasting image of digging a ditch out of mad despair, Ray will find his way back to the Big Apple’s stomping ground to dispense, and take, more complicated justice to movie stars, producers, high-powered business minds, and the kind of crooked authority that get dirtier as the day gets long.