Leverage

Every once in a while a new TV show will come out which has the potential to go into the history books. I say CSI, I say Prison Break, I say Lost and you know what I’m talking about.

When any of these shows started no-one really knew what to expect. A TV show about forensic scientists working on a different case every episode? How is that fun? Now it’s nine years later and we know the answer. Nine seasons and two spin off shows have made the CSI franchise a huge success. The same could be said about Prison Break and Lost, no-one knew what to expect but they were both recipes for success after the very first episode.

The new TV show Leverage is a show that does get you interested the first time you see the commercial for the pilot, which was the same for a lot of people with CSI, Prison Break and Lost. However I do not think Leverage will be as successful as any of the mentioned shows.

For one, Leverage hitchhikes on the success of the Ocean movies (Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, of course). The concept of a bunch of funny bad guys planning and robbing an enemy who is equally bad and then pulling off the break in with some spectacular idea’s and plot twists. The concept is great and many movies have used it in the past but only the Ocean movies made the genre insanely popular because of the outstanding A-grade cast.

Second, the show does not take itself seriously. One of the things that makes the ’smart thieves’ genre so good is the gadgets they use to execute the plan which often border on the impossible (think the Pinch in Ocean’s Eleven or lifting an entire house in Ocean’s Twelve). Leverage, however, takes that idea to a whole new and overdone level by introducing a know-it-all hacker into the group who can hack into absolutely anything, anywhere and work with every piece of digital hardware known in the history of man. This is fun for a little bit but when you see this guy in his office behind a simple laptop hacking into the engine computer of a Boeing 747 while it’s actually in the air, that’s overdoing it by miles.

This point is also enforced by another character who apparently is the brother of Super Man because  he can have 15 people pointing automatic machine guns at him and still kick all of their collective asses before any of them gets a shot off.

Third, repetitive. Funny bad guys breaking into other bad guys safe in extremely clever way is only fun for so long and you can only come up with so many story lines before it gets extremely old. There is a reason the movies in this genre are few and far between. You have to come up with a solid story to make it work.

In conclusion, I think that Leverage is a very cool TV show to download and watch in my own time. It’s not something I’d stay home for on a Thursday evening or even sit down for if I happen to be home at that time. I also don’t see Leverage make it past the second season, if it even gets past the first. Story lines tend to get repetitive quick and when that happens shows tend to get canceled (example: Las Vegas).

Robin