Ridley Scott’s new Philadelphia crime caper is a cracker of a show

A couple of street hoods steal drugs from selected dealers while posing as DEA agents in this hilarious yet disturbing series. Put it on your watch list – it’s a blast.

Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura (Narcos) play Ray and Manny on Dope Thief on Apple TV+

We don’t normally think of Philadelphia, nicknamed the City of Brotherly Love, when it comes to crime fiction. But it’s also known as a place that’s “quick to anger, prickly and prideful, wary of the new”, according to writer Chris Satullo.

It’s the perfect backdrop for Dope Thief, Apple TV’s new, hilarious at times, and rather disturbing at others, crime caper that follows a couple of street hoods stealing drugs from selected dealers, “low-level tweakers”, while posing as DEA agents. “They don’t remember your face, just your badge,” is their modus operandi.

Their dangerous scheme eventually lands the pair in the crosshairs of an implacable, powerful operation connected to the hidden narcotics corridor on the eastern seaboard, determined to hunt them down and exact revenge. They are also pursued, a little ironically, by the real DEA, just as deadly as the facially tattooed sicarios sent looking for retribution.

Dope Thief is a cracker of a show, possessing a pulpy vitality, superb acting and diverting action sequences, and it is as astutely engineered as any series we’ve seen this year.

It’s also about what it’s like to be family, and how the loneliness of men can sometimes result in tender relationships, while all around is grim mayhem. And about how these men struggle for some sort of better life, even though they know the odds are stacked against them, their futures bleakly predictable, even as they seek atonement.

Originally titled Sinking Spring, the series is from Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions; the famed director is also executive producer and director of the first episode establishing the show’s distinctive, visceral aesthetic, which is tight, trim and tense.

The show, years in the making, was created by Peter Craig, not only a successful crime author but a seasoned screenwriter known for films such as The Batman, The Town, and Top Gun Maverick. It’s based on the novel of the same title by Dennis Tafoya, author of two other highly acclaimed books, The Wolves of Fairmount Park and The Poor Boy’s Game.

Tafoya’s inspiration for Dope Thief, according to online magazine Bucks Happening, apparently came from an alarming real-life event in remote Plumsteadville, a small Pennsylvania township where a meth lab fire led to the discovery of a body in the woods. At the time, Tafoya was working as a medical technician in nearby Bucks County, and the incident stayed with him for years. This haunting image set the foundation for a heist novel that explores the dark underbelly of malfeasance and consequence. Respected crime magazine Kirkus Reviews called it: “An impressive debut by a writer savvy enough to understand that the way to a reader’s heart is often as not through flawed characters.”

Ridley Scott at the TCL Chinese Theatre in August 2024 in Los Angeles. Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic. Picture: Getty Images.

The two leading characters in Craig’s series are certainly that. Brian Tyree Henry is cocky Ray Driscoll, full of hustler bombast and the gift of the gab, a born wheeler-dealer who believes he’s cleaning the streets by his robberies. But his life is complicated by Teresa, a brilliant Kate Mulgrew, longtime girlfriend of his incarcerated father, Bart, an equally impressive Ving Rhames, who raised him as her son and to whom he is emotionally indebted, even if she’s addicted to her lottery tickets.

Wagner Moura is vulnerable and emotional as his best friend, Manny Carvalho, who desperately wants the violent situation he finds himself in to disappear. Who wouldn’t? Sherry (Liz Caribel Sierra), his faithful girlfriend, doesn’t know about his illegal vocation and has little time for the hustling Ray.

Henry and Moura are heartbreakingly convincing in these roles. Their rattled-off dialogues together are like pieces of street opera, abrasively shrill but weirdly full of affection.

Craig says he has little problem with being hemmed in a little to the crime genre, especially after the success of The Town, the successful thriller directed by Ben Affleck. “I got very comfortable in it really quickly,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I started as a novelist who wrote books that were only moderately read, but they were respected crime books that were mostly about conmen. I just loved the genre because the stakes are immediately there, and you can do what you want to do with character.”

Craig has worked mainly in feature films and Dope Thief is his first TV venture. He says he studied Mad Men scripts to learn how it was done, the celebrated series teaching him about the way to create layered characters.

“It’s great TV when there can always be another layer to somebody no matter how much you scratch him,” he said in another interview with the Creative Screenwriting website.

The trick in all the great crime shows, he found, is the way the main character starts as a “regular person and you put them in a terrible situation, and you watch them adapt to it”, he says citing The Godfather and Breaking Bad. He was also after the feel of ’70s crime movies such as Chinatown and Dog Day Afternoon, the quirky humour and the way that, in those movies, it comes from unexpected places in the writing.

And to add to the pile of influences, there was Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Straw Dogs. “I watched those over and over, and try to capture some of that feeling. Sam was gritty, he was ugly. He let things get really uncomfortable and you felt like if somebody’s arm got scraped, you felt that scrape on your own arm.”

Creator Peter Craig was after the feel of series is such as Breaking Bad, starring Bryan Cranston as Walter White, above.

Craig was working with Scott on a film project and showed him the pilot script for Dope Thief he had been writing at the same time. Scott liked Craig’s sense of dark humour and wanted to do TV again. “TV is a massive basket full of balls,” he said recently. “Every now and again something comes up like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, and that influences everybody, who then rushes to that ball to copy it and it’s already too late. That’s how I function as a director – what’s the next ball?”

Dope Thief was his.

His movies, so often grandiose, high-concept and philosophical, have always been intensely cinematic, taking audiences to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. Oscar-winning Hollywood director Sydney Pollack called him one of cinema’s great stylists, along with Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker: “Every shot has a great idea in it.”

While the series has been heavily promoted as if Scott is a stranger to TV, across the 30 years of its existence Scott Free has received more than 100 Emmy nominations with 22 wins, and 28 Golden Globe nominations for its TV projects. But this project is new territory for Ridley Scott.

His last, Raised By Wolves, a high-concept sci-fi series, was not the success he had hoped for, but he was ready to do television again.

“So once Ridley jumped on, it suddenly looked like we had a show, and I just went at it,” Craig said. “I just went towards the daylight, like a plant that grows towards the daylight. And I was lucky enough that I had committed early on to something that I understood really well. So it was partly the opportunity, and it was partly the love at first sight of Ray and Manny.”

As you might expect of Scott, he cleverly establishes the world of this drama and its characters while introducing the series’ long-running themes and visual language. Craig says he treats it all like theatre, often using several cameras so he only needs a couple of takes. There were often four crowded in on his two leading actors somehow still brilliantly lit by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, a regular on David Fincher projects and who also worked on Raised By Wolves.

Martin Freeman as Lester Nygaard in the TV series, Fargo.... “eternal dusk”.

They were after what Scott called a disorienting feeling of “eternal dusk” through the series, using the Coen brothers’ Fargo as another influence. The series presents the decaying sections of Pennsylvania with the lonely, echoing streets, the sunlight always muted and washed out, and the rain always threatening.

The first episode is a masterclass in direction when Ray and Manny’s lives are ignominiously altered when they take on a new hand, hiring Rick (Spenser Granese) when Ray targets a remote farm that’s the base for a clan lab, a clandestine laboratory, manufacturing narcotics. But the new guy panics and the ensuing shootout leaves him dead. Ray has a bullet in his shoulder, and he and Manny are on the run, with a voice on a stolen radio taunting them about killing them, and their families.

Dope Thief might struggle a bit after Scott sets the pace – like so many shows these days it’s a little too attenuated – but whatever, it’s a blast.

Dope Thief,streaming on Apple TV+.