When I am stressed or busy or generally too fried to watch serious shows like Deadwood or Breaking Bad or even unwilling to ponder the occasionally disappointing strangeness of Lost, I watch crime procedurals. I love them, and have begun to slowly work my way through nearly all of them. I know the big guns pretty well, the hefty Law and Order and CSI franchises, but I’ve also seen many of the slightly re-worked variations where you add a mathematician, a forensic anthropologist, a psychic, a fake psychic, a guy with OCD, or a US Marshal to the mix. (My biggest lacuna in this area is probably NCIS, but one day when I’m particularly out of sorts, its day will come).
Lately, my too-fried-to-think show has been TNT’s original program Leverage, which combines all the fun of an Ocean’s 11-style brotherhood of criminals with the deeply comforting, formulaic familiarity of a highly episodic procedural show. It hits my personal sweet spot in mindless entertainment, where the crimes tend to be less about desperate, senseless violence and more about heists, hijinks, thefts, cons, shenanigans, and general high-spirited fun.
The whole premise truly is an Ocean’s 11 rip-off, as each episode features Nate Ford and his talented team taking on big injustices that can only be righted outside the bounds of conventional legality. Also, righting the big injustices tends to involve stealing priceless artwork or valuable secret formulas or diamonds held inside impenetrable vaults, and it usually requires elaborate personas, costumes, funny fake accents, repelling down elevator shafts, hijacking security feeds, and almost always at least one person dressed as some form of law enforcement officer. To my mind, Leverage even improves on the original Ocean’s 11 by including two women on the five-person team, and almost always giving at least one of them something to do other than play the sexy temptress.
Boss, grifter, hacker, muscle, thief
The dialogue is snappy, Hardison the hacker peppers his banter with Star Trek jokes (he woefully wishes farewell to his beloved security van Lucille by telling her that he “has been, and always shall be, your friend”), and the boss comes pre-loaded with the required tragic, alcoholic past to make us worry just a touch about his mental stability. It’s fun, fluffy, and more self-aware than Law and Order. Leverage even has that one quality I love most irrationally about Ocean’s 11: the fun, string bass and organ musical score, full of winking and sly laughter. It’s not why I get up every day and write about television, but it definitely scratches an itch.