TV is the New Reading

TNT’s ‘Leverage’

a great grifter romp

Grifters make good television.

So long as they themselves aren’t the target, everyone loves watching for the misdirection, the sleight of hand, the grand long con. Or in the words of “Chicago’s” Billy Flynn, “Back since the days of old Methuselah / Everyone loves the big bamboozler.”

Part of it is the ballet, watching the mark get caught up in the fancy footwork of a grand yarn. Part of it is the vicarious tension of a high-wire act – the desperate question of “will they get away with it?”

And in the case of “Leverage,” you’re rooting for the cons, because in the world of the show, they’re actually the good guys.

More understated than NBC’s “Heist,” more public-minded than AMC’s “Hustle” and much more compelling than FX’s “Thief,” “Leverage” binds a cadre of talented rogues together under the leadership of Timothy Hutton as Nate Ford, a former investigator for a corrupt insurance firm. He’d recovered millions for them, but when the company cut off his family’s health benefits in the face of his son’s illness, refusing to cover what they called “experimental” treatment, Ford walks out.

In Tuesday’s pilot episode, Ford is approached by a hapless airplane developer whose top-secret plans for a commercial jet are stolen by a rival. Ford pulls his team together and they’re on the case. And they are successful. The guy gets the plans. But before long they discover that the guy has in fact screwed them. Along with not paying them for the industrial espionage he hired them for – the plans were never actually his in the first place – he tries to kill them.

So a revenge scenario is hatched, involving a seductive actress of Ford’s acquaintance. The mark finds himself playing a high-stakes game of international intrigue with Nigerian diplomats and – what’s more entertaining – even though the guy thinks that he’s uncovered their scam and figures he’s going to get it to blow up in their face on the eve of a big stockholder win, the team yanks the rug out from under him and ... well, I’ve been a fan of these kinds of shows for a long time, and I didn’t see that endgame coming at all.

Of course, it’s hard to track everything that’s going on with beautiful blonde women flying through the air on wires and computer geniuses cracking codes amid hand-to-hand combat and scams cinched by now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sleight of hand in high-pressure negotiations. The end result is so dazzling it can only be described as magic.

So the format is set. Ford’s team – played brilliantly by Aldis Hodge, Christian Kane, Beth Riesgraf and Gina Bellman – takes on cases where giant corporations have victimized helpless, hapless people and ... even the odds. “You’re suffering under an enormous weight,” Ford says. “We provide ... leverage.”

“Leverage” airs at 9 p.m. Tuesdays on TNT.

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