A Pause to Watch: Leverage
Mrs. Cupp and I finished the first season of Leverage last evening, though she missed a few episodes. She’s busier than I, you see. Overall a fun show about a former top-notch insurance agency investigator named Nathan Ford who left the company after his boss denied coverage on an experimental medical treatment that would have saved his son’s life. He now works, with some of the former criminals he used to track, to provide the powerless with leverage. Basically he and his team use their expertise at theft to right wrongs inflicted on people for whom the law offers no aid and no justice.
I was a little worried that the show would play the all-too-easy “insurance company equals evil” motif and thereby disparage an entire industry and profession, but we learn at the end of the first season that the insurance company’s policy that denied coverage to Nathan’s young son was the result of the current CEO and hadn’t always been the policy. In other words, the show doesn’t depict the insurance company itself as a villainous institution. Like all institutions, it has its villains and its people trying to do the right thing.
The show’s characters drive the plots and help the stories to stay a step above annoying moralizing. Timothy Hutton plays Nathan Ford as a skilled “honest man” who can lead a team of crooks and keep them focused on the plans he designs. He grieves for his son, is divorced from his wife, and describes himself as a functional alcoholic–with an emphasis on the functional.
His team is comprised of Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman), an excellent con artist, thief, and actress when, and only when, she’s engaged in a crime. Christian Kane, my one allotted man-crush, plays the tough guy Eliot. Aldis Hodge is the handsome computer geek Hardison, and Beth Reisgraf plays the certifiably insane and much too adorably cute über-thief, Parker. Some shows would remain essential the same with a whole new crop of characters; Leverage isn’t one of them. Take out one character, and the show would be something very different.
The creators of the show, Chris Downey and John Rogers, know how to keep the action rapidly moving while maintaining a slow, steady, and subtle development of the characters. The relationship between Sophie and Nathan, for example, incarnates the expression “It’s complicated.” You know what’s there between them, and they do as well, but there are armored-truck-loads of reasons why the two don’t form a romantic bond, at least in the initial season.
Here’s hoping our library picks up the following seasons.
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Christian Kane, my one allotted man-crush, plays the touch guy Eliot.
That guy needs a serious haircut. Did you see him in the first season of Angel when he had short hair? He played a lawyer and the shorter, neater hair style looked far more professional.
Oh, yes. Angel introduced me to Mr. Kane.
We’re gonna work on season two as soon as we finish Battlestar Galactica. Your description of Parker is exact. Reisgraf is exactly that.
Battlestar is on my to-see list. Right after the second season of Dollhouse.
That’s when we watched it!
There’s a whole lotta talk about a man’s attraction to another man in these com boxes. ;)
It’s a good show, man crush notwithstanding. Fun, light, and well produced.
My wife and I have an understanding.