The scammers keep scamming. And so the hackers, cat burglars and con artists of the Leverage crew have saddled up once again to balance the scales. Back for a second season on Amazon’s Freevee, the team on “Leverage: Redemption” stares corruption jauntily in the eye and says: Make my day.
I’ve always admired this thematic approach, in part because it’s such a rarity. Networks tend to prefer wealth-aganda, swamping us with TV series that poke fun at the rich but are fundamentally about centering their angst and woes while delicately sidestepping how those fortunes were amassed and the unscrupulous systems that make them possible. The status quo could use a shake-up and I consider it a much-needed antidote that the new episodes of “Leverage: Redemption” are coming out amid new seasons of “The White Lotus” and “The Crown.”
The show is built around a delicious premise: Heists with a wink — and a heart. Has someone been wronged by a rich person who is plundering and destroying people’s lives in order to pad out their net worth? Then the Leverage team will swoop in with an elaborate caper while cracking wise. The goal? Karmic justice. The schemes are implausible but that’s embedded in the show’s lighthearted approach.
“Leverage” may not rise to the definition of prestige TV — funny how all those shows about wealthy people do — but it’s enormous fun with a knowing sense of humor about itself. That’s perhaps why the very in-demand Aldis Hodge (now also the star of Showtime’s “City on a Hill” as well as the blockbuster “Black Adam”) made time to return for an episode or two. His career is going in a decidedly more high-profile direction — that’s not a slight on “Leverage” by the way, but emblematic of where it lands in the insular, status-obsessed world of Hollywood rankings — but he clearly still wants to be part of the show where possible. Maybe it’s because he’s allowed to be funny!
But Season 2 also reveals the limits of “Leverage’s” wish-fulfillment, which even the show acknowledges. The gang plots to shut down a smuggler’s operation that’s been dumping garbage in the ocean. Breanna, the youngest member of the team (played by Aleyse Shannon), pauses midway through their planning session to point out that going after this one bad dude won’t make much of a dent in the problem: “It’s the corporations — they’re going to keep making plastic and that plastic is going to keep ending up as pollution, so why are we not going after them?”
To which the wisened grifter Sophie (Gina Bellman) responds: “This team can’t solve the world’s bigger problems. We’re not built for it. What we can do is help one person — and then the next, and then the next. And then we look back and you see how much you’ve changed. It’s baby steps.”
She’s right. And it’s a worthy reality check. This is the show managing expectations.
But what if “Leverage” did think bigger? What if storylines were expanded out from “one bad guy must be stopped” to “How can we help and support unionizing efforts across the country?” or “What if we could hatch a plan to undercut big pharma overcharging for drugs like insulin?” or “Can we find a way to publicly shame and embarrass corporate titans who benefit from massive tax breaks instead of paying into a system that should benefit us all?”
“Leverage” is first and foremost frothy entertainment, so maybe that’s unfair. No one show can (or should have to) shoulder that kind of thematic responsibility. Only three episodes were provided to critics, so it’s possible that as the season goes on, the team’s ambitions deepen.
As it is, their targets in the first few episodes are fantastical — a dictator from an Eastern European nation in one, an antiquities smuggler in another — rather than plain old capitalists exploiting and screwing over everyday people as a matter of course. As a matter of business.
Shall we talk about the elephant in the room? “Leverage” is produced by Amazon. This week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced he plans to donate his personal wealth, somewhere in the neighborhood of $124 billion, to charitable causes. The news came on the same day that Amazon announced it would be laying off 10,000 employees. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
One might wonder how Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers — with their unionizing efforts and a push for better, more humane working conditions — greeted this news. If Bezos is planning to give away all his money, why not start by improving the notorious conditions faced by his labor force and also … not laying them off?
“Leverage” can probably only go so far in its critiques before raising the hackles of someone up the food chain at Amazon. That’s true, I’d imagine, of any show or movie made by an entertainment conglomerate.
We can’t rely on TV and film to inspire us into collective action, but the media we consume does shape how we see the world — and whether or not we can envision what it takes to bring about meaningful change.
One of the primary roles of fiction — even escapist TV — is to actually ponder some of those ideas.
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'LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION'
3 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-14
How to watch: Season 2 premiered Wednesday on Amazon Freevee
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