LOS ANGELES — On a set so authentically dressed to resemble a boxing gym that you could almost smell the mildewed towels, a man on the floor was howling in pain as two burly-looking goons dragged him by the ankles. Anyone familiar with the work of Ann Biderman, the creator of the series being shot, “Ray Donovan,” would instantly recognize that the scene incorporated three of her favorite subjects: violence, Los Angeles and thugs.

“I seem to love writing about crime and tortured men,” said Biderman, whose “Southland,” a recently canceled drama about Los Angeles patrol officers and detectives, was beloved by critics and those in law enforcement for its unwavering realism.

But if “Southland” existed primarily in the bedraggled streets of Los Angeles’ east side, “Ray Donovan” which begins Sunday on Showtime, unfolds in neighborhoods of crazy excess like Malibu and Beverly Hills. The brusque title character (Liev Schreiber) specializes in cleaning up after celebrities — a dead girl found in an athlete’s bed, a closeted actor being blackmailed. Whether whispering orders into his cellphone or speeding across the city in his Mercedes, Donovan is constantly distracted by the needs of his wife and children, his two befuddled thug brothers and the looming threat of his dad (Jon Voight), a murderous ex-con trying to slither back into his old spot as family patriarch.

Biderman said she’d been thinking about placing a fixer at the center of a television series for years. But “Ray Donovan” was born when she decided to embed the character in an unruly working-class family shadowed by the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. When asked why Los Angeles appealed to her as a setting, she wrinkled her brow. “Where else would it be?” she asked. “It’s a town I know.”

Judging from the familiar faces on the set last month, she knows a lot of people, too. They included the respected British character actor Eddie Marsan, who plays Ray’s brother, Terry, a retired pugilist fluttering with early onset Parkinson’s. The bespectacled gentleman peering closely at one of the camera monitors was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia”), a writer and co-executive producer on “Ray Donovan.” Even the actor being hauled across the grimy floor of the boxing club has a pedigree: He’s the actor and playwright Michael Cristofer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, “The Shadow Box.”

As for the star of the series, Schreiber’s brutish intensity has served him well on Broadway (he won a Tony for “Glengarry Glen Ross”), in indie films and as third leads in big-budget Hollywood movies like “Salt” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Starring on a television series was never part of the plan, he said, until he read the pilot script for “Ray Donovan” and then met with the persuasive Biderman.

“There’s something about the male subconscious that she gets really well,” Schreiber explained. “Every other group in the world has kind of progressed psychologically, spiritually and politically. The average man is still playing off a 19th century sense of honor, duty and that hunter-gatherer thing. And Ann gets that. She gets how displaced a lot of men feel, and the psychology of violence and sexuality and that we are desperate for an upgrade.”

Asked why she’s so good at writing about emotionally complicated men, Biderman said, “Other kids watched ‘Gigi,’ and I watched ‘The Detective.’” (It’s a 1968 Frank Sinatra movie.)

But maybe she’s also seen more than her fair share of such men. She was born in Miami, but when she was 8 her businessman father and free-spirit mother divorced and she moved with her mother to Manhattan and the legendary Chelsea Hotel. “Wildly bohemian,” is how Biderman described her mother, Peggy Biderman, who introduced her daughter to the world of film and avant-garde theater and a life swirling with musicians, artists and gifted wordsmiths like her mother’s longtime lover, the Beat poet Gregory Corso, whom she refers to as her “spiritual stepfather.”

Stability, financial or otherwise, was in short supply, however. When money was tight, they’d return to Miami. “We’d move into these little mafia hotels,” she said. “Lots of rough men, who worked on boats, lived there.”

After attending the University of Southern California’s film school, Biderman analyzed mountains of screenplays as a reader at United Artists in the mid-1970s and inadvertently got a crash course in story structure. Though she’d distinguish herself as the screenwriter of “Primal Fear,” “Public Enemies,” and “Copycat,” her first crack at television should have told her something: In the mid-’90s a brief stint at “NYPD Blue” won her an Emmy for best writing in a drama.

It was back in 2008 that Biderman was hired to create a series about police in Los Angeles. She devoted more than a half a year to riding along with a police gang unit. On her first night, the detectives left her alone with the body of a murder victim. “He was so young and had this huge tattoo across his chest that said ‘MARIA’S CHILD,’” Biderman said. That searing image made its way into the “Southland” pilot, which aired the next year.