Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: faux-DEA thriller series Dope Thief.
Maybe it’s best to get the bad in Apple TV+’s new crime series, Dope Thief, out of the way first. The who, what, where of how two men, Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura), having finessed a scheme to pose as DEA agents in order to confiscate cash off unsuspecting drug dealers, end up in hot water with a kingpin with a serial killer phone voice is the show’s weakest aspect. It’s not worth the cerebral effort needed to keep track of all these criminals, agents, and double-crossers. If you take a healthy guess at who’s puppeteering who at around the midpoint, there’s a very decent chance you’ll be proven right.
And, yet, having fallen at the first hurdle of what crime shows should offer audiences (Suspense! Intrigue! Logic!), something inside me still compels me to recommend Dope Thief. I may not care what these dudes are up to, but I do care a lot about who they are. Much of that, unsurprisingly, lies at Henry and Moura’s feet. If you strip away the narrative specifics, this is a show about a psychic spiralling, in which two men convinced they’ve reached a nirvana of absolute control – a dinghy amongst the choppy waves of Philadelphia’s streets – discover how naive they truly are. We’re watching men become reduced to boys by life’s cruelties.
Ray and Manny live in perpetual fear of the retrograde. Ray is convinced he’ll end up like his incarcerated father (Ving Rhames), that because he was raised like a “stray dog”, he’s destined to act as feral as one. The idea of romantic love seems entirely out of bonds. Manny has a doting fiancée (Liz Caribel Sierra) and the promise of newfound stability, but faith-fuelled shame is rattling around in the back of his brain, threatening to hurl him back into old addictions.
Both their (inevitable) breakdowns are played with real, wounded desperation. It’s beautifully done. “How many different ways do we have to go to hell, Ray?” Manny cries. You can sense the exhaustion in his voice, the question of how much punishment will be enough punishment, of whether there is absolution at the end of the road or a grave. There are excellent supporting turns, too, from Marin Ireland as one of their faux-DEA ruse targets, and Kate Mulgrew as Theresa, the straight-talking but affectionate woman who raised Ray.
Ray and Manny’s pain is so affecting because we’ve experienced, too, so much of their warmth. Their friendship is tender in ways we rarely see in this grim, crime-fixated calibre of show – there’s no posturing talk of loyalty and brotherhood, they merely love each other openly and vulnerably, which makes it especially tragic when that bond comes under a volcanic amount of outside pressure. Dope Thief is also surprisingly funny. There’s a secret MVP to be found in the silliest, little goober of a white terrier they found to play Theresa’s spoiled pooch Shermie.
None of this is exactly unexpected for creator Peter Craig, whose work as a screenwriter has unearthed the human in the crime stories boiling away at the centre of The Town (2010) and The Batman (2022). The same could be said of executive producer and director of its first episode, the great Ridley Scott, who does a lot to establish tone.
The tension here is feverish and untethered, as if anyone could die at any second, and Philadelphia and its rural outskirts have been turned into decayed, near-Gothic mausoleums – which certainly helps when the series takes a sudden right turn into what feels like Saw territory. The usual things about Dope Thief don’t work. Somehow that’s OK.
