Leverage The First Season
If your iPhone breaks, don’t you wish you could take Apple for millions of dollars?
That’s what the team of TNT’s hit original seriesLeverage does for their clients. Oscar Winner Timothy Hutton plays Nate Ford, an ex-insurance investigator, who goes off the deep end after his own insurance company lets his son die of cancer.
By a twist of fate Nate is reunited with a bunch of criminals he had foiled in the past. A socially awkward professional thief (Beth Riesgraf), a computer geek (Aldis Hodge), and a hired gun (Christian Kane) get roped into a one-time job. When things fall through, they need help from professional grifter and horrible actress Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman).
They eventually team up to form the Leverage organization where they help regular people enact vengeance on huge corporations, corrupt government officials, and even illegal mobsters.
The show offers an interesting twist. Doing the wrong thing for the right reason ends up being a cute little show.
Sure, TNT may have cornered the market on Lifetime-eque shows, a la The Closer and Saving Grace, but this show is different.
Leverage offers a nice spin on the procedural crime drama. Instead of solving the case you see how this team of con artists best some really nasty characters.
The ensemble cast is amazing. Riesgraf is hilarious as the socially inept Parker and Hodge does get some really good lines as the geeky yet smooth Hardison. Gina Bellman shows her talent with voices offering up a bunch of different characters and accents.
The writing on the show is quick and smart and the plot development is even smarter. It’s so good you may want to start pick-pocketing and conning.
The first season is a must-see. The DVD set includes deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes featurette that offers some insight into the technical planning of some of the cons. There are two short featurettes about the actors finding out about the show being renewed and the specific cameras being used.
They are fairly random and don’t add much. There is also a spoof by Riesgraf pulling a diva moment and a fight scene retrospective.
You can catch new episodes of Leverage Wednesdays on TNT.
