At its best, Leverage is better than just watchable

This official TNT season-two preview gives some of the flavor of the Leverage gang. Three episodes from season two remain to air Wednesday nights (including tonight) at 10pm ET/PT, repeated at 1am.

by Ken

No, Leverage isn't one of my favorite shows. Episodes tend to pile up on my DVR and then get watched in bulk when I need to clear space. Note, however, that I could just delete them. The show is competently crafted and eminently watchable. The reason I commend it to your attention is that now and then -- as in a couple of the most recently shown episodes -- it shows flashes of something more.

It's a scam-slash-caper show, though nowhere near as stylish or individual as AMC's Hustle. The hook is that this gang led by former insurance investigator Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton) isn't in it for the loot; it's out to right wrongs committed against people with no recourse. Think A Team folded into Hustle with the ghost of Mission: Impossible hovering over. As with the TNT show with which it's been regularly paired until now, the dark but not terribly believable undercover-cop drama Dark Blue, it is, as I say, eminently watchable, but generally unmemorable -- the viewer is left too much leisure to recall how good Timothy Hutton was as Archie Goodwin in the Nero Wolfe mysteries and how good Dylan McDermott was as Bobby on The Practice.

You can see that creator-producers Dean Devlin, Chris Downey, and John Rogers have worked hard to build an array of complexities and complications and quirks into each of the characters. We've got Nate's strangely self-destructive drinking and inability to relate humanly to much of anybody, including the gang's scam mistress Sophie (Gina Bellman, probably best known to most of us as Jane the ditzy nymphomaniac from the British series Coupling), who is frustratingly unable to rouse any romantic interest from him. Then there's Eliot (Christian Kane), the bull-headed but boyishly charming martial-arts banger (try not to think of Mr. T); and Hardison (Aldis Hodge), the electronics and computer wizard who constantly winds up doing other things he's not so good at; and Parker (Beth Riesgraf), the safecracker-daredevil who, judging from what I read online, seems to be a lot of viewers' favorite.

For the later episodes of this season Sophie, having withdrawn from the gang presumably out of frustration over Nate's nonresponsiveness, offers them as designated scam babe (doesn't every gang of scammers have to have a scam babe?) her much more businesslike friend Tara (Jeri Ryan), who has difficulty finding her place in the group. The mystery turns out to be easily explained: Gina Bellman was having a baby! Latest word is that she will be ready to go for season three.

This is all fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go all that far. The nonreactive chemistry between Nate and Sophie doesn't make for vivid drama, and in fact with most of the characters we get more biographical facts than real human dimension. TNT's slogan is "We know drama" (based, apparently, on its business acumen in shelling out the bucks to wrest Law & Order away from A&E), but USA's emphasis on "character" seems to me why it's been producing so much high-quality TV drama in recent years. (That said, TNT has to be credited with two unqualified series triumphs: the enchanting comedy My Boys, about a vividly created band of Chicago 20-somethings that more or less centers around a female sportswriter P. J. Franklin (the hopelessly beguiling Jordana Spiro, pictured here), and the policier-cum-family soap-cum-theological-angel-apparition-drama Saving Grace, with Holly Hunter always amazing as Grace, and a strong cast around her.)

So what gives me heart? For one thing, I'm noticing in the more recent episodes -- maybe it was there in the earlier ones, but I'm just noticing it now -- how funny Hardison can be, especially when he bitches about the total nonrecognition he gets for the prodigies he performs routinely sitting at his computer keyboard. His colleagues hardly seem him doing anything, and of course haven't the slightest clue how he does it.

My favorite moment: Hardison, listening in to the audio feed from the others in the bar downstairs, hears that in order to prevent their mark from making his way to the airport and leaving the country, they need a weather report that will persuade him the snow is so severe, his plane can't possibly leave, keeping him in the bar. He proceeds to improvise, singlehandedly and in a matter of a few minutes, a slightly goofy but just believable enough weather report, which he's already hacked to feed into the bar's TV.

That episode, "The Bottle Job," as a whole is another of my "signs of hope." Nate found himself trying to save the bar in which he had more or less grown up, the de facto "office" of his father, who turns out to have been a ruthless loan shark. Timothy Hutton isn't really a good enough actor to be a convincing "man of mystery." Spelling out some of those mysteries was a terrific idea; finally the character began taking on some involving dimension.

This was even more true in last week's episode, "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job," where the gang finds itself in Ukraine on what becomes a personal mission for Nate: rescuing his wrongfully arrested ex-wife Maggie. In a brilliant way, the presentation of Maggie filled in a huge gap in Nate's personality. The bumbling, the drinking, the human unreachableness -- it's all explained by the simple reality that the poor guy is still hopelessly in love with her. Someone had the inspiration to cast the fascinating Kari Matchett (it's a shame somebody thought she had to be blondified, though [UPDATE: expert commenters inform us that Kari's a natural blond; see the comments]), who was the leading lady of the Canadian repertory company with whom Hutton did all those Nero Wolfe shows -- they're really quite wonderful together. Here, although badly out of sync, is a sample: