Leverage is Awesome

 I have been having dark thoughts of late, but Camp NaNoWriMo is over so maybe I’ll be a little less stressed and be able to catch up on some more stuff. Like the Book Diary--there’s a new album for this year’s books, by the way, and moving some of the stuff over was kind of a pain in the butt, so I would appreciate it if people looked at those.

Speaking of which I’ve got to update that.

Anyway I got Leverage’s fourth season as a gift recently and I’ve been rewatching that and it’s great.

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Leverage is Awesome

Alright so in the late 2000’s to early 2010’s there was this show on TNT from the guy who made the Librarian movies which capitalized on love of heist movies and the fact that people were not… thrilled with the big corporations and banks after the recession. It stars a team of criminals who help people that have been screwed over by the rich and powerful, using their select skillsets, and righting wrongs that the law has overlooked.

Do you like heist movies? Cool because every episode of Leverage is essentially a short heist story, including that bit at the end where the show explains to you how they did everything. Admittedly it sometimes took some risks--I am fairly certain that some of the computer tricks Hardison pulls are just magic with the handwave of “He’s a hacker!” And you can tell sometimes when they’re limited by the TV budget.

But you know what? This series is pretty darn good. It’s not that continuity-heavy of a show for the most part. Yes, there are ongoing character arcs, and every season has its own Plot. But from one episode to another you don’t usually need that much information to understand what’s going on. You can pick up the characters’ relationships from context, and most of the adventures are fairly self-contained.

That’s rare in television these days, at least among the shows I watch. Not that I mind serialized fiction, I absolutely love it. Give me a slow-burn overarching story and I’ll go nuts (see: my love of Dresden Files and my frustration with Assassin’s Creed). But I do also appreciate a series that I can enter in any episode and still have fun watching it without feeling as if I have to watch half a dozen other episodes just to get the full context. I feel bad rewatching episodes of Person of Interest by themselves sometimes, because I want to see how they all got to where they are in that one case. I recognize that’s unreasonable, considering I’ve already seen the series before, but there it is.

I don’t have that problem with Leverage. I can rewatch almost any given episode in the series without feeling like I need to catch up.

Also this is a show that loves its characters. Actually loves them. No, it’s the greatest drama that ever graced television, but it doesn’t decide to torture its characters in every episode in order to make a point about suffering or something. Mind you, that’s not to say that it never tortures characters--it does sometimes. Nate goes through quite a lot over the course of the series. There’s an episode in which Hardison (a claustrophobic man) gets trapped in a buried coffin. And  Lord knows Elliot gets beaten and drugged quite a lot.

But the suffering is never the point. I think a lot of dramas throw characters into more explicit torture for the sake of saying, “Here is how we make a character complex.” Arrow comes to mind. And considering the kinds of people they deal with in this show, it would not be out of the question for one of them to go through actual torture on screen, or have a lot of innocent bystanders get killed in front of you. I suppose this was in the days before Game of Thrones made it popular, and it is on TNT, but there very well could have been a lot more on-screen suffering if the creators had wished it.

And there’s not. 

Look, sometimes you want hardcore drama, and that’s fine. Sometimes you want war stories, you want crime stories, you want a television series that really gut punches the heroes so that you can see someone go through Hell and come out on top. But sometimes you just want to watch something fun. You want to watch a group of very clever thieves outwit some douchebag that’s been stealing from people even though he has way more money than he needs already, making clever quips all the while.

Yes, it’s very Robin Hoodian in its approach. One that is fairly simple in its approach in most episodes. But that’s okay.

We can have fun sometimes. 

Leverage has lovable and memorable characters, it has great humor, it has fun stories, and it’s accessible enough that you can jump in almost anywhere. The few recurring Plot threads

I am cautiously optimistic about the revival/sequel series that’s supposedly in the works. I haven’t looked into it enough to know the progress on that, and I’m aware of how things in Hollywood can kind of… stop happening when they’re chugging along seemingly well enough for months. But I think it has much of the same creative team, and most of the cast is coming back--except Timothy Hutton because--so I think it’s reasonable to assume that if it does happen, it will at least be entertaining.

If you can find a way to watch the series, I’d recommend tracking it down. The whole thing used to be on Netflix, but got taken down a few years ago. Also the first season is weirdly expensive on DVD? But if you manage to find a way, it’s well worth tracking down.

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