It takes approximately 3,600 hours of on-the-job training to qualify as a police detective in the UK – or about 1,000 hours of true-crime content. Once you’re up to date on 24 Hours in Police Custody, can accurately guess the killer within the opening strains of the Dateline theme tune (pro tip: it’s the husband), and have developed a strong working theory on the Jill Dando assassination, you should be automatically granted powers of arrest, shouldn’t you?
Similarly, while watching Dope Thief, the Apple TV+ miniseries (streaming from 14 March) about a pair of small-time stick-up guys, played by Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura, any ordinary viewer will feel they’d climb the cartel’s promotion track faster than these knuckleheads. I know I would. You don’t watch all five seasons of The Wire and Breaking Bad, plus six of Better Call Saul, without picking up a thing or two about evading police detection and the importance of a clear managerial structure among meth-heads. Meanwhile, these dumb-dumbs are stumbling on to the eastern seaboard’s main drug-trafficking corridor, without so much as pressing play on Narcos season one. Which is especially weird, because Moura also starred in that one.
At first, Ray (Henry) and Manny (Moura) come across as an intelligent, self-motivated duo. Their stakeout banter is sparkling and Ray has an amusing bit about doing “the command voice”: that authoritative tone used to train dogs, say, or rob drug dealers at gunpoint, while posing as a DEA agent. Still, this grift was bound to go awry sooner or later, and when it does – in explosive “Hillbilly Chernobyl” fashion – Ray and Manny make the kinds of mistakes that only someone who’d never seen an episode of Ozark could muster.
They’re like co-eds in a slasher film, the way they run around massacre scenes in a panic and credulously hang on to every word uttered by a bad guy on the other end of the phone line. This guy – Gravel Voice, let’s call him – never actually asks the question “Do you like scary movies?”, but you can tell he really, really wants to. He represents a shadowy Alliance and his identity is supposed to be a mystery, though if you can’t guess it by episode six, I suggest you ask your GP to check you for signs of a serious brain injury.
Gravel Voice isn’t the most naturally authoritative person on the show. That honour goes to Ray’s brassy foster mum, Theresa “Ma” Bowers, played by Kate Mulgrew with a flamboyant regional accent. It’s not quite Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown, but she’s doing her darnedest to entertain with rhotic “r”s and rounded “o”s, and it’s appreciated. Nor is Gravel Voice even the gravelliest voice. That would be Mina (Marin Ireland), the DEA agent with the serious larynx injury. So why Ray and Manny bother with him is anybody’s guess.
Beyond all this, though, their most inexplicable error is not simply getting the hell out of Dodge – or, in this case, north Philly – as soon as they start to feel the heat. They insist on sticking around, even with the DEA, a white supremacist biker gang and a Mexican cartel on their tail. Omar from The Wire would never.
Is Philadelphia that great that you would risk life, limb and loved ones to stay within the city limits? Hard to say, since every episode, including the Ridley Scott-directed premiere, makes this town look much the same as any other decaying, post industrial, end-of-empire American city. It’s a place where the only available healthcare is “self-medication”, and not just for the mental health impact of childhood trauma either, but for actual gunshot wounds.
So many guns! So many traumatic memories! Dope Thief is basically shootouts interspersed with sepia-tinted flashbacks ad infinitum, and I only made it past episode three because Ma has a leopard-print coat I want and Brian Tyree Henry is such a ridiculously good actor he could invest a Philly cheesesteak with vulnerability and complex emotion. But maybe it needs to be said in a command voice, if we really want people to listen? Give this man a role worthy of his talent. Now.
