Thick with Thieves

By James Poniewozik

Before taking a bullet in the first episode of this season of The Sopranos, mob boss Tony Soprano was at the top of his game: secure in his business, flush with income, gorging on expensive sushi. When it comes to the TV-crime business, Tony has largely been the unchallenged boss too. Television has occasionally featured wrongfully accused men (The Fugitive) or misunderstood rogues (The Dukes of Hazzard), but TV has mainly been a good guys' zone. Now there are people gunning for Tony in the TV biz as well; the medium is in the middle of a full-blown love affair with crooks. And we're not just talking Martha Stewart.

Two shows this spring introduce viewers to the world of high-stakes thievery, while series on tap for summer and fall look sympathetically at petty crooks and mobsters. Next year, Michael C. Hall, formerly of Six Feet Under, plays a serial killer on Showtime. He used to slab 'em. Now he'll stab 'em.

The Sopranos has undoubtedly influenced those projects. Its sixth-season debut drew 9.5 million viewers--not huge by network standards, but all paying customers. "It showed us that audiences could connect to a guy so deeply flawed as to be a murderer," says NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly. The networks have tried and failed to emulate it before: CBS with Falcone in 2000, NBC with Mexican-mob drama Kingpin in 2003.

In the meantime, however, there has been a wave of TV cop shows, in the CSI and Law & Order molds, that may have reached viewers' saturation point. And in the past few years, broadcast and basic-cable networks have gradually introduced flawed, even criminal protagonists to all kinds of shows: the antiheroes of FX's The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me; the cruelly sarcastic doctor on House; and the castaways of Lost, who include a heroin addict, a torturer and several killers. (Fox's Prison Break is also set among criminals, although it's about a wrongfully imprisoned man and the brother who is trying to spring him from jail.) "Mainstream audiences are now getting comfortable with the fact that there are different kinds of lead characters," says Reilly.

There are also different kinds of criminals, not all of them in Tony's league--feloniously or dramatically. The high-class burglars in NBC's Heist (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), planning to take down a Beverly Hills jewelry store, fall into the Ocean's Eleven school of fast-talking, ice-cool swells. (Hustle, a British import nearing the end of its season on AMC, takes a similar tack with a band of con artists.) The robbers (led by Dougray Scott and The Practice's Steve Harris) gab about strippers and Mother Teresa while on a job; the cops who chase them self-consciously reference Lethal Weapon. Created by brothers Mark and Robb Cullen and co-executive-produced by Doug Liman, who directed Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Heist takes a lighthearted tone familiar from the movies--assuring viewers that they're in safe territory.

"As dramatists, you make a pact with your audience that you don't cross certain lines, and we don't," says Mark Cullen. Heist's crooks don't kill--in the pilot, they foil a murder--and they take, Robin Hood-- like, only from the rich. (So they skip the give-to-the-poor bit. Nobody's perfect!) In fact, Heist's greatest crime is robbing innocent movies of their cliches: the Tarantino-gone-PG banter, the whooshing camera shots, the generic peppy jazz that sounds as if it were lifted from a Putumayo Presents Lighthearted Caper Music of the World CD.

For the first few minutes, FX's Thief (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) seems to be in the same jaunty, crime's-a-spree mold. As in Heist, we begin with a wisecracking crew getting ready to take down a cache of jewels--"Just say no to blow, kids," quips ringleader Nick (Andre Braugher) as he blasts open a vault. But the game quickly gets heavy, and the story more gripping: along the way, Nick's crew finds and steals a pile of cash that turns out to belong to the Chinese Mafia. Revenge is sought, friends turn on each other, and people are killed brutally.

Braugher is a surprising choice as Nick, since he has been closely associated with upstanding types like cops and doctors (Homicide, Gideon's Crossing). But, Braugher insists, "Nick is an honorable character"--in his own way. Unlike Tony Soprano, he is unselfish and has tightly circumscribed rules--don't let emotion get in the way of business, don't rob anyone who won't be made whole by insurance--and he's an attentive family man. In the middle of the first robbery, he takes a cell-phone call from his stepdaughter's school. But when his men break one rule--don't deviate from the plan--his carefully constructed partitions crumble, and the chaos threatens both his crew and his family.

"Thief is about the moral choices of immoral men," says creator Norman Morrill, which is why he cast Braugher. It's a well-observed, sometimes too somber character study, its Southern-gothic mournfulness underscored not just by Braugher's tough, sad performance but also by the setting: post-Katrina New Orleans, littered with abandoned cars and LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT signs spray-painted on plywood. (The show was set and the pilot shot in the city a year before the hurricane.) Like his town, Nick has to restore order from the rubble, and it's not a glamorous job. "This is the anti-Ocean's Eleven," says Morrill. "I wanted this show to be about middle-class guys. We're not all criminals, but what makes us men is how we choose to stand--how we meet those things that are hard for all of us."

The show doesn't strain the Katrina parallels, but it's unsurprisingly tempting to tie crime stories to class and social conditions--to look at the why of crime where CSI has peered through its microscope at the how. NBC's The Black Donnellys, debuting in the fall, comes from the writers of the Oscar-winning message movie Crash and tells the story of four brothers drawn into the Irish Mob. "They live in a world against impossible odds," says co-creator Bobby Moresco, who loosely based the show, with co-creator Paul Haggis, on his New York City childhood.

If you can't wait that long to get your crime-and-fraternal-struggle-in-working- class-America fix, there's Showtime's Brotherhood, which debuts in June. That drama, which features two brothers--one a rising politician, the other a small-time crook--is set in Providence, R.I., but also explores fate and circumstance in the mournful, urban-blighted Northeast of a generation ago. "Without getting too highfalutin," says creator Blake Masters about the trend toward villain protagonists, "post-9/11, we hit some of our darkest days, and now we're in a war that will go on for years against an enemy we can't understand. One of the things we can do in TV and movies is explore that stuff."

If this material sounds politically fraught, cop shows have always been: whether you focus on crime's punishment or its causes is to some people a key dividing line between conservative and liberal. But the toughest antihero for middle America to warm to may be the lead actor of Showtime's forthcoming Dexter, a serial killer who has channeled his impulses by becoming a forensics expert who solves crimes, then offs the criminals. "If you're compelled to kill," jokes Hall, "it may as well be people who deserve it."

The premise is chilling, but viewers are meant to identify with Dexter because he's aware of his pathology and struggles with it. "There is something inherently good about him," says Hall. "He's lovable, which is what creates the ambiguity." America in love with a bloodthirsty killer who slaughters menaces to society? Maybe Tony Soprano really does have something to worry about.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell / Los Angeles