I really had no interest in watching Dope Thief. It’s another of those crime dramas set in a bleak-looking city – possibly there are some pretty parts of Philadelphia but we only get to see the bad bits – where everyone seems to be on welfare or a drug dealer, or both, everything looks washed out, grimy and grey, and where you could die horribly any second. And I get quite enough of all this on my increasingly rare trips to London.
But I was desperate. I’ve finished the second season of Severance (very good; definitely worth the effort); White Lotus will only see you through one night a week; season three of Reacher is so dismal it doesn’t even qualify as ‘so bad it’s good’. So I needed something else and the online reviews for Dope Thief looked decent.
Directed (at least the first episode is) by executive producer Ridley Scott, Dope Thief is definitely a cut above your usual inner-city depression porn. The pacing is snappy so that you’re drawn straight in, the tension is relentlessly high, the dialogue sharp and funny and the storytelling economical: when a character’s past needs illuminating, you’re treated to very rapid, almost subliminal, black and white flashbacks, so no time is wasted developing hinterland.
Our lovably feckless protagonists are ne’er-do-wells and lifelong friends Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura), who scrape a living by dressing up as drug enforcement agents and raiding small-time local drug dealers, relieving them of their drugs and petty cash. All is ticking along nicely until a friend, newly released from prison, suggests they raise their aims a little higher and try to make some more serious money.
Inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong when they try to muscle in on a much bigger operation which happens to involve both real undercover DEA agents and the kind of heavy-duty drugs kingpin you never want to cross. Ray’s and Manny’s shambolic lives spiral out of control as it emerges that not only do the vengeful baddies know where they live but are eager to slaughter them, their loved ones and even their most casual acquaintances – and probably their cute dog.
By the end of the first episode I was hooked, but by the end of the third I’d begun to have reservations. What bothers me, slightly, is the jarring mix of very graphic violence (heads chopped off, throats cut in the bath, etc.) with amiable, warm-hearted domestic comedy. Sure, it’s a strength of sorts, because the latter makes the former more bearable; but it’s also a weakness because it feels a bit like cheating, as if the series can’t quite decide how seriously it wants to take the implacability of the looming threat.
Much of the comic relief comes from the scenes involving the boys’ respective womenfolk: Ray lives with his beloved adoptive mother Theresa (Kate Mulgrew); Manny with his girlfriend Sherry (Liz Caribel Sierra). Neither can bring himself to explain to his loved ones just how dire the situation is, which is fine at first, with Ray trying to pack off his mom to an out-of-town hotel (he pretends he has won a freebie in a radio phone-in quiz) while he looks after her incontinent pooch. But as the net closes in, the farcical shenanigans become increasingly irksome. ‘There are gangs of murderous bikers outside your house wanting to kill you all. Stop bickering. Leave now!’ you want to scream at the TV.
By the end of the first episode I was hooked, but by the end of the third I’d begun to have reservations
Though I’m bound to keep watching, because the characters are likeable and well acted, the body count keeps you on the edge of your seat, and I’m dying to find out how Ray and Manny are going to manage to stay alive for eight whole episodes, I suspect I’m going to remain hugely irritated by the essential implausibility of the set-up and the uncertainty of tone.
Besides, what else can I watch to pass the time? Certainly not Chess Masters: The Endgame, which is the BBC’s desperate attempt to make a clinical board game sexy and fun by giving it the Bake Off treatment. That is, a range of characters, carefully selected so as to push all the correct class, gender and race buttons, find themselves thrilled beyond measure to be participating in a chess competition, compèred by a loveable, wisecracking TV personality (Sue Perkins) and, in purple trousers and a natty waistcoat, a former contestant from The Traitors (Anthony Mathurin).
The participants have exciting nicknames – the Unruly Knight; the Unrelenting Warrior; etc. – and lightly intriguing backstories: one has been battling cancer; another learned to play in prison; another was inspired by watching Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit. But there’s one insuperable problem that the show is doomed never to overcome: it involves two players moving funny-shaped pieces almost interminably over a black and white board until at last one or other of them apparently wins.
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