Leverage squee
Jul. 26th, 2009 01:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeThe appeal of Leverage can be summed up in five parts: (1) Smartly written (2) likable, interesting characters who like each other (3) skillfully work together (4) to run clever, entertaining scams in order to earn justice and recompense for (5) innocent people who have been crushed by the wealth and power of governmental and corporate corruption. Our heroes trick, hack, swindle, grift, and sometimes jump off of buildings (in order to break into them, cat-burglar style), all of which is super-fun television. They do all this equally because they enjoy running scans and (in the words of Christian Kane's last TV show), in order to help the helpless. The cast is excellent; the characters are endearing. It's light and breezy, maybe just a little bit too much so, but I forgive it, because it is so faultlessly entertaining.
Leverage really good-hearted, and I don't just mean because of the idealistic ethos, or the idea that these thieves would be so generous (the pilot episode leaves them all independently wealthy, neatly knocking personal greed out of the equation and making this implausibility slightly more plausible). I've noticed that no one innocent ever gets hurt in the cons. Oh, our thieves beat up gangbangers and hired killers; they frame corrupt legal officials and politicians, strip wealthy men of their ill-gotten gains, leave mobsters exposed and vulnerable to their enemies. But all the secretaries, the self-absorbed office workers, the credulous law enforcement--the clueless pawns that our thieves casually manipulate in their cons--these people are never hurt, never even humiliated by the knowledge of their own mistakes. Leverage Consulting is a force for justice, and in their operations, only the bad guys are ever injured. That's morally simplistic and sort of ridiculous, and it could be argued that that's a fault, but I like it, and I think it's quite deliberate; we couldn't root for the Leverage crew so easily if they were constantly screwing over unwitting bystanders. There is not, at present, a shortage of cynicism on television; I appreciate the show's ethos, which is that we can choose not to be bastards, we can choose to not hurt people, that not hurting people is both possible and desirable.
But it's a fine line between breezy fun and shallow pap, and Leverage has to stay on the right side of it. The victims of the week take awful damage before we meet them, but after Leverage Consulting makes things better for them, the victims go away and we forget about them. It could so easily turn trite, but that problem is greatly negated by the centrality of Nathan Ford, Leverage's ringleader and token honest man. Nate's young son died when the insurance company Nate worked for denied the insurance claim needed to pay for life-saving treatment. Nate is now a broken, drunken mess of a man, walking around with a bloody wound in his heart that will never heal. He's the most brilliant of a set of geniuses, but he's always teetering on the edge of the abyss, and sometimes he slips and we find ourselves staring aghast at the rawness of his pain. Nate drinks--he drinks a lot, in practically every episode; the other characters dance around that, ignoring it when they can, fidgeting when they can't, uncertain of how they should react to Nate's blatant self-destructiveness. The drinking is regular reminder of Nate's incurable damage, and an anchor against the show's breeziness: there is sometimes no restitution possible for the wrongs done to someone. There is sometimes no such thing as a win.
Nate provides the show's working philosophy at the end of the pilot episode in a short speech that I adore, explaining the group's purpose to a potential client:
I assure you that it is not silly or cheesy when he says it: Timothy Hutton's measured delivery, which hints at a terrifying mix of rage and grief and cold calculation, gives me chills. Hutton is a phenomenal actor and he can bring a lot of power to a scene when he needs to; I think that most people would fall flat on those lines, but he gets them perfectly. It's always worth paying attention to Nate's lines, actually; Hutton makes even very mild things gorgeous to the ear.
(On a side note: the characters do a lot of role-playing, and lots of accents. Sophie, whose default voice is cultured British English, is the queen of them--I started taking notes at some point, and so far I have her down for the following accents: South African, Irish, New Jersey, Indian, Italian, something which I think was supposed to be Egyptian, some Northern English, American Southern, American standard, and New Zealander. But Nate and Hardison also do a variety of accents and voices; my favorite is Nate's one-time use of a Boston Brahmin accent, which cracks me up. I love good linguistic mimicry, and this show is awash in it.)
Leverage really good-hearted, and I don't just mean because of the idealistic ethos, or the idea that these thieves would be so generous (the pilot episode leaves them all independently wealthy, neatly knocking personal greed out of the equation and making this implausibility slightly more plausible). I've noticed that no one innocent ever gets hurt in the cons. Oh, our thieves beat up gangbangers and hired killers; they frame corrupt legal officials and politicians, strip wealthy men of their ill-gotten gains, leave mobsters exposed and vulnerable to their enemies. But all the secretaries, the self-absorbed office workers, the credulous law enforcement--the clueless pawns that our thieves casually manipulate in their cons--these people are never hurt, never even humiliated by the knowledge of their own mistakes. Leverage Consulting is a force for justice, and in their operations, only the bad guys are ever injured. That's morally simplistic and sort of ridiculous, and it could be argued that that's a fault, but I like it, and I think it's quite deliberate; we couldn't root for the Leverage crew so easily if they were constantly screwing over unwitting bystanders. There is not, at present, a shortage of cynicism on television; I appreciate the show's ethos, which is that we can choose not to be bastards, we can choose to not hurt people, that not hurting people is both possible and desirable.
But it's a fine line between breezy fun and shallow pap, and Leverage has to stay on the right side of it. The victims of the week take awful damage before we meet them, but after Leverage Consulting makes things better for them, the victims go away and we forget about them. It could so easily turn trite, but that problem is greatly negated by the centrality of Nathan Ford, Leverage's ringleader and token honest man. Nate's young son died when the insurance company Nate worked for denied the insurance claim needed to pay for life-saving treatment. Nate is now a broken, drunken mess of a man, walking around with a bloody wound in his heart that will never heal. He's the most brilliant of a set of geniuses, but he's always teetering on the edge of the abyss, and sometimes he slips and we find ourselves staring aghast at the rawness of his pain. Nate drinks--he drinks a lot, in practically every episode; the other characters dance around that, ignoring it when they can, fidgeting when they can't, uncertain of how they should react to Nate's blatant self-destructiveness. The drinking is regular reminder of Nate's incurable damage, and an anchor against the show's breeziness: there is sometimes no restitution possible for the wrongs done to someone. There is sometimes no such thing as a win.
Nate provides the show's working philosophy at the end of the pilot episode in a short speech that I adore, explaining the group's purpose to a potential client:
People like that, corporations like that: they have all the money, they have all the power, and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you're suffering under an enormous weight. We provide...leverage.
I assure you that it is not silly or cheesy when he says it: Timothy Hutton's measured delivery, which hints at a terrifying mix of rage and grief and cold calculation, gives me chills. Hutton is a phenomenal actor and he can bring a lot of power to a scene when he needs to; I think that most people would fall flat on those lines, but he gets them perfectly. It's always worth paying attention to Nate's lines, actually; Hutton makes even very mild things gorgeous to the ear.
(On a side note: the characters do a lot of role-playing, and lots of accents. Sophie, whose default voice is cultured British English, is the queen of them--I started taking notes at some point, and so far I have her down for the following accents: South African, Irish, New Jersey, Indian, Italian, something which I think was supposed to be Egyptian, some Northern English, American Southern, American standard, and New Zealander. But Nate and Hardison also do a variety of accents and voices; my favorite is Nate's one-time use of a Boston Brahmin accent, which cracks me up. I love good linguistic mimicry, and this show is awash in it.)