Leverage Buy-In

Though from 2008-2013 I had AMC most of the time, I never really watched Leverage when it was new.  Or even when they probably showed reruns.  Or on-demand.  Really it wasn't until a couple years ago that I watched a few episodes on ION when they ran marathons on some Sundays.  But the problem with that was it was hard to watch them in order and you might end up seeing some of the same ones from week to week.  It was the same when Pluto TV added a Leverage channel that showed it 24/7.  Hulu didn't have it and it wasn't on Amazon Prime either.

Finally I found out it was on the Tubi TV streaming service so I could binge the show from start to finish.  There are some commercials, but probably not as many as watching it on Pluto TV.

Anyway, I liked the show.  The basic premise is kind of a mix of Suicide Squad and Mission: Impossible or The A-Team.  It's about a team of "bad guys" who help people, most of whom have been screwed over by big corporations.

The pilot episode establishes the premise and the team.  An airline executive contacts former insurance investigator Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton) to ask him to supervise a team of three criminals so they can steal back some plans for an engine or something.  The team is:

Hitter:  Eliot Spencer is a former Special Forces soldier (it's not clear which unit really) who wound up working as muscle-for-hire.  He doesn't use guns, but makes up for it with speed and skill--sort of like Batman without the costume or Batarangs.  He's also a good cook and ladies man.

Hacker:  Alec Hardison is a young black man who's one of the best hackers in the world.  Like all TV/movie hackers, he can basically do whatever the plot calls for in a few keystrokes.  Disable security?  Research a target?  Create fake IDs?  Plant fake stories on newspaper sites, blogs, and so on?  Just clickity, clickity, click and it's done.  He and Eliot have a sort of Odo and Quark relationship through the series in that on the surface they act like they hate each other, but they really don't.

Thief:  Parker is like a far less annoying Harley Quinn in that she's hot and crazy.  But also she's an exceptionally nimble thief who can tumble through a bunch of lasers without setting them off or dive from twenty stories into a building or to escape one.  She didn't have a normal childhood and so is emotionally stunted and doesn't really get along with others.

The first job seems to go off pretty well.  Nate comes up with the plan and the other three execute it well enough.  But their employer double-crosses them and tries to blow them up.  That's when they realize that the plans they were stealing were actually the property of that company and they were inadvertently giving them to a rival company.

To get back at their treacherous employer, the team bands together to steal the plans a second time, this time from the guy who paid them to steal them the first time.  But to pull off the heist, they add another member to the team:

Grifter:  Sophie Devereaux is a British woman who's a tremendously bad theater actor and also an art thief.  She and Nate have had a cat-and-mouse game going from when he was an insurance investigator and would chase her around the world to try to recover paintings she stole.  Which is why when they need a con artist to help get the plans back, he calls on her.

So the team is able to get the plans back and destroy the guy who double-crossed them.  Then they decide to stay together and help people who are being screwed over by big corporations and such.  They call themselves Leverage Consulting because they provide leverage for those who otherwise would be crushed by the system.  Get it?

The pilot takes place in Chicago, but the rest of the first season moves to Los Angeles.  The basic formula is the team takes a case, they come up with a plan, that initial plan falls apart, things get complicated, and then in the end they pull off some clever con or heist (or both) to defeat the bad guys.  Most of the stories take place near their home city, but sometimes they'll go off to a small town somewhere or a couple of times even to other countries.

At the end of the first season their LA office is blown up, so the show moves to Boston for the next three seasons.  Nate is from Boston and moves into a local tavern where his bookie father used to hold court.  Later in the third season he has to thwart a scheme hatched by his father, played by Tom Skerritt.

According to IMDB while it was supposed to be Boston, they were actually filming in Portland.  Then in the fifth season, after their office is raided again, the show moves to Portland for real.  In the last episode a reason for choosing Portand is given.

Anyway, the show has the same five people all the way through except in the second season the lady playing Sophie must have been pregnant because she spends most of that season in London or traveling to other countries so they only show her on computer or phone screens from the shoulders up.  I just assume it was so they didn't have to show her baby bump because they didn't want to work it into the show. (And hey I looked it up on IMDB and I was right!  Yay me!)

For most of that season there was a substitute grifter friend of hers played by Jeri Ryan.  Which a Fun Fact about the show is there are a lot of Star Trek actors involved in the series.  Jonathan Frakes directed a number of episodes and appeared in a non-speaking role in one.  One episode features Brent Spiner as a bad guy and Armin Shimmerman as a crooked witness in a trial.  Wil Wheaton appears in three episodes as a hacker rival of Hardison who goes by the name "Chaos."  There may have been a couple of others I didn't notice or don't remember.  I'm not sure what the reason for that is.

I really liked the show for the most part.  Even though most of the stories aren't that believable, it's like any heist/con artist movie where it's fun just to see how they're going to pull it off.  Heist/con artist movies they're really like magic shows in that you're watching to see if the magician can pull off the trick he/she claims.  And like a mystery story there's often the fun of trying to see if you can figure out how they did it before the show reveals it.  Because most of the time they'll show you most everything as it happens, but they might omit a few details for the big reveal at the end.  From a logical standpoint you know that most of the stuff they do could never work in the real world, especially all the hacking stuff, so you have to suspend disbelief.

It was also a show that didn't usually take itself too seriously.  There were some serious episodes (usually near the end of a season) but there were also some goofier episodes like when they derail a Walmart-type store from opening or steal a minor league baseball team or convince Cary Elwes he was stealing the Spruce Goose or convincing a CEO he was making first contact with aliens or steal a bunch of failed toys to create a Furby/Tickle-Me-Elmo-type sensation during the holiday season.  Then there was Nate's fun catchphrase, "Let's go steal a [whatever]."  Like, Let's go steal a mountain.  Or a movie.  Or even a country when they rigged an election in a tiny country to stop an arms dealer.  It's always good when a series can walk that line between comedy and drama so it doesn't get too grim and gritty.

During the series four of the team end up hooking up.  Nate and Sophie become a couple and while they try to hide it, eventually everyone finds out about it.  The problem for them is Nate puts the work before everything else and most of the series he has a drinking problem.  During the third or fourth season Hardison and Parker also start going out, which is a new thing for Parker while for Hardison it's hard to keep up with her and to get through her emotional walls.  Eliot is the only one who doesn't get to partner up since there are only 5 people, but he gets plenty of random tail, so maybe he's better off.  Or not.  The good thing is they never really made these relationships the centerpiece of the show.  There was no will they-won't they crap like an NBC sitcom or CW superhero show.  So it provided added character depth without distracting from the overall stories.  Which is really how that should work unless you're doing a soap opera.

The one main thing to complain about is the effects budget was not great.  A lot of obvious green screen effects for instance when they're infiltrating buildings or a lot of times even driving.  But then this didn't have the budget of Game of Thrones, I'm sure.

There were 77 episodes of the show in total.  I suppose the problem for this was the time it aired on AMC.  It was always overshadowed by the more popular shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead.  Those got a lot more attention and I'm sure a lot more money behind them.  But if you like heist/con artist movies like Ocean's Eleven or Matchstick Men or whatever then this is fun to watch and it's free on Tubi TV and Pluto TV and if they still show it on ION, which makes it a good option if you're still in quarantine or just burned through everything else you wanted to watch while you were in quarantine.

Since I doubt anyone will read the whole entry, I'll spoil the ending.  In the last episode the team pulls off a job to steal a secret Interpol file that details crimes of all the big companies during the financial meltdown of 2008.  They put that file out on the "Dark Web" for any other white hat types to use against the bad guys.  Afterwards, Nate proposes to Sophie and she accepts, so they go off to start a new life.  Parker takes over the team and it ends with her repeating Nate's speech from the first episode about how they provide...Leverage. Ha.