Let's Go Steal A Newsletter - Vol. 1
The first instalment in an experimental series about my relationship with the TNT series Leverage and the show's subsequent reboot.
This is still Hyperfixate, but hijacked by one specific American television show from the late noughties. It will come out every Friday. Maybe once a month. I haven’t decided. If you’re new here, get used to me making things up as I go along. Sign up here.
What’s this? Hyperfixate on a Friday? Not one but two pieces in the same week? Where is the mortally disorganized Ariane we all know and love?
Worry not, dear reader, that Ariane is very much alive and well. In fact, let’s manage our collective expectations here and now: this is a new series on Hyperfixate following my obsession with TNT’s Leverage and IMDb TV’s revival of the show, Leverage Redemption. It may come once a month, it may come once a week accompanying our usual Wednesday shenanigans. We will see how it goes.
The reason I wanted to write for my own newsletter in the first place is to challenge myself to just write. I was quite moved this morning reading from Substack’s Dear Writer column where Anna Codrea-Rado of Lance, where she posits as a reminder: “Even if no one read me, what would I write about?” I have been caught up in the ennui of celebrity crushes and trying to be funny. If nobody read me, I’d still write about all that; pop culture, television, the gravitas of Jon Bernthal’s gorgeous nose—All of it! I love talking about these things, either way, but I want to talk about more stuff that I love. Specifically, television.
So, here goes nothing: Hyperfixate presents Let’s Go Steal A Newsletter — an ode to and sometimes an analysis of the TNT action-drama series Leverage. The title of which comes from one of the show’s many catchphrases. Before every heist, they say “let’s go steal a…” It could be anything; a mountain, a congressman, and one time a potato.
What is Leverage?
Leverage follows a team of five reformed criminals—hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, and mastermind—as they carry out heists and seek justice for ordinary folks wronged by the government or massive corporations. They’re like a band of Robin Hoods if you will. It’s The A-Team meets Ocean’s Eleven meets Mission: Impossible as they pull off a variety of (often ridiculous) cons to get the job done.
Each season has a self-contained story (a contingency the writers made sure of in the event they were to get canceled), and each episode often follows the same story structure: the team meets the client—a disenfranchised citizen that wants justice and is never about the money, they do their reconnaissance on their mark—the greedy Big Bad, their con goes well until it doesn’t, and it turns out the plan failing was part of the plan all along, with flashbacks to show how the team outsmarts their villains. It’s an homage to action crime dramas from the 70s and 80s. Creator Dean Devlin pitched the show to TNT as a throwback to the Mission: Impossible series and The Rockford Files with a more hopeful twist. Devlin said he “didn’t want to live in a dark world”, and that’s reflected in the show’s tone and all the different ways our anti-heroes triumph over scammers and evil CEOs.
All their cons have catchy names and some are even based on real-life ones. The show hired Apollo Robbins as a technical advisor to design their pickpocketing lifts and other confidence crimes—he even appeared in the second season of the show playing a rival thief. The marks are what’s more interesting to me. A lot of the team’s targets are rooted in reality; they go after everyone from Big Pharma execs covering up consumer deaths to fraudulent Bernie Madoff-esque investment managers. Love seeing rich people get fucked over, I wish Leverage was real.
Who is Leverage? — “Sometimes Bad Guys, Make the Best Good Guys.”
The Leverage team consists of mastermind Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton), a former insurance investigator who lost his son when his former employers wouldn’t pay out his insurance claim for an experimental treatment that could’ve saved the boy’s life.
Spiraling down a well of self-destruction and alcoholism, he’s approached by Victor Dubenich (Saul Rubinek), an engineer who claims his designs have been stolen by a rival airline. Dubenich has already hired a team for the job—retrieval expert and hitter Eliot Spencer (Christian Kane), infamous hacker Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge, love of my life), and the world’s greatest but most unstable thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf)—but needs Ford to keep them in line and force these notorious lone wolves to work together. They agree to walk away from each other once the job is done.
After successfully carrying out this heist, Dubenich double-crosses the team and tries to have them killed. Wanting payback, Ford enlists the help of Sophie Deveraux (Gina Bellman), a British grifter and wannabe actress he spent years chasing down for art-related crimes for their next and final job: to steal back the plans and take Dubenich down. Shorting the stock to Dubenich’s company as part of their plan, Nate makes the team millions of dollars which leaves them well-off enough to never have to work again. As they all walk away from each other, they realize that working together has been the most fun they’ve had in a while, and agree to stay together as long as Nate picks their targets and plans out their heists.
The pilot episode ends with Ford and co. speaking to a new client that wonders why the team does what they do, to which Ford replies:
’’People like that…corporations like that, they have all the money and all the power and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you are suffering under an enormous weight. We provide … Leverage.”
The team, of course, continue to work together for five years, moving from Los Angeles to Boston (or Portland cosplaying as Boston), to Portland (as itself). Within that time, we get to see how they grow to depend on and open up to each other. These thieves and con-men that have only looked out for themselves start looking out for one another, earning their reputation as one of the best crews in the business. The only crew in the business of their kind.
I saw someone on Tumblr call it: “the fastest found family speed-run you have ever seen.” And they’ve kind of hit the nail on the head with that.
Nate Ford is the surrogate father figure; angry, drunk, and full of hard-knock life wisdom. The team has implicit trust in him, even when they feel like he’s out of control. There are times where Ford lets his emotions get the better of him, especially when the jobs remind him of his son or his father, but he always has something up his sleeve (even when he doesn’t). Ford dies off-screen before the revival, Leverage: Redemption, due to Timothy Hutton’s legal troubles (which includes the alleged rape of a teenaged actress). He doesn’t leave much of a gap in the revival, as The Librarians’ Noah Wyle steps in to play lawyer-fixer Harry Wilson.
Then we have Eliot, Parker, and Hardison. Each of them is so used to working alone and so used to compartmentalizing their emotions that forcing them to be a part of each other’s lives makes for a great dramatic and comedic payoff on the show. They’re mercenaries, and now they’re almost vigilantes.
Eliot often acts as the voice of reason and a man of many facets. He isn’t just the hardened veteran-slash-implied assassin with a dark past, he’s also a passionate chef, a ladies’ man, and a pretty decent country singer. He becomes very protective of the crew, often to a fault, getting himself beat within an inch of his life just so the others don’t have to fight. What I love most about Eliot is how even when he’s up against a gaggle of goons trying to kill him, he bests them all and provides constructive criticism in the process. He can ram a knife through a guy’s shoulder and chide them for not dodging, encouraging them to do better next time or else. It’s a funny little bit that I think is kind of cute: extending professional courtesy even when someone is trying to kill you. He’s the big brother, often providing Hardison and Parker with advice as reluctantly as they ask for them. He feels like he owes a lot to Nate for pulling him out of the dark side, but wishes that Nate would see how important he is to other people.
Parker, my beloved, is the group’s eccentric thief. Growing up from foster home to foster home, Parker eventually started stealing cars, catching the eye of legendary thief Archie Leach (Richard Chamberlain) as a child and trained to become the world’s greatest thief. She doesn’t have a last name, that we know of, and Archie is the closest thing she has to family until the crew comes along. Parker has no problem jumping of buildings and climbing through vents and elevator shafts—in fact, she loves them. But connecting to other people has always been an issue. Her awkwardness is often played for laughs, like when she has to resist the urge to stab or tase a mark, but cuts a little deeper when she starts developing feelings for Hardison.
Hardison, the youngest in the crew, is geeky but sexy and awkward but endearing. It’s no secret that he’s my favourite. I’ve had a crush on Aldis Hodge since I was 12 and guess what? It has not gone away! He is my ideal man. He has a reputation for breaking into the Pentagon and sticking his Nana’s medical bills to the Icelandic government but cannot go two seconds without dropping a Star Trek or Doctor Who reference. He is the quintessential nerd of the 2010s. There’s an episode in Season 3 where he plays the solo at the end of Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade and I think about it every goddamn day. Despite all his skills and genius, Hardison often gets in over his head—wanting to lead before he’s ready and creating overly complicated cons that could backfire (this time not on purpose). His slow and awkward courtship with Parker will be a recurring topic of discussion in this newsletter. I’m obsessed with them.
Last but not least, we have Miss Sophie Deveraux. Sophie Deveraux is not her real name. It becomes a recurring joke throughout the series. Despite being a convincing liar and a skilled, experienced grifter, Sophie is a terrible actress. Her acting career also becomes the butt of many jokes throughout the team’s time together. According to Nate, Sophie can only act when she’s committing a crime. She and Nate go way, way back—to a years-long chase across Europe where they never acted upon their mutual attraction to one another. I love that despite her feelings for Nate, she never lets him trample over her, never lets him off the hook for any time she’s been mistreated. When they do get together, it’s not that big of a deal, sort of a natural but fraught progression. The show’s revival is more about Sophie and less about losing Nate, even though the latter is the catalyst for her arc.
The gang is often supported by and chased after a colourful hodge-podge of recurring characters, most notably James Sterling (Supernatural’s Mark Sheppard)—a former insurance investigator colleague of Nate’s turned Interpol agent. Sterling butts heads with the crew but turns a blind eye when it also serves him. They often fuck with him for fun, too. Then there’s Nate’s ex-wife Maggie, an art curator initially skeptical of Nate’s life of crime but plays small roles in their cons for time to time. Sophie was replaced in Season 2 with Tara Cole (Jeri Ryan), a fellow grifter and former FBI agent, when Gina Bellman had to go on maternity leave. The group’s chemistry almost makes you forget that they haven’t known each other for very long, despite their closeness.
I’ll Do You One Better, Why is Leverage?
I’ve noticed that when I watched the show growing up—the late noughties and early 2010s—that found family tropes were prevalent and very popular among my demographic.
I guess it was an observation I made in a Tumblr/Twitter bubble, where the most popular shows, films, books, bands, or whatever fandom it was had this element or need for one’s friends to become their chosen family or an extension of their family. For one’s fictional comforts to be a part of that extension too. It’s really reductive to attribute the popularity of infamous pieces of Western television like Supernatural, BBC’s Sherlock, or Doctor Who to an extremely popular set of character tropes, but you can’t deny that it does stem from the desire for young people to have community, even if it is on low-stakes, emotionally safe grounds (that in the cases of those shows often spiral out of control into ridiculous identity politics and virtue signaling, I’ll write about that some other time).
The thing about Leverage is that the stakes are low even when they seem high, the cast are brilliant together, and people love watching a world where the bad guys lose because other bad guys decide to use their power for good. It’s almost utopian. It’s baby’s first, cable TV sanitized taste of anti-capitalism and anarchy. The CEOs and billionaires are just as bad as the mob bosses and crime lords, Leverage posits. Which isn’t new, but isn’t something the regular viewer in 2008 wanted to hear. I think the regular viewer in 2008 needed to hear that. I think Leverage was born out of the stock market crashing and Obama-era policies. They often impersonate federal agents or congresspeople on the show, there’s a line where Nate says “no one actually knows their congressman” and they get away with it. I think it was the only show at the time that could envision, no matter how morally or ethically dubious, a future where good triumphs over the evils of greed.
Of course, the show isn’t perfect. There is a fair share of things that haven’t aged well or performances that may not be the best. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Some Fridays from now, I’ll be taking you on a journey, bit by bit, excavating anything and everything Leverage. I’ll break down episodes, characters, arcs, cons, and lore to hopefully convince a few of you to watch the show and its reboot. Classic Ari, always doing free PR for TV she’s obsessed with.
That’s all for this week! For real now! Hope you liked this!
Happy Holidays!