Just watched episode 7. Wow, that was dumb as it gets.
Leverage was always a fun and lighthearted show and featured a great ensemble cast with: Timothy Hutton playing the ‘mastermind’, Beth Riesgraf as the ‘thief’, Christian Kane as the ‘hitter’, Gina Bellman as the ‘grifter’ and Aldis Hodge as the ‘hacker’. So I was delighted when I heard they’ve started streaming the first half season of ‘Leverage: Redemption’.
What do you think of the show so far, do you think they’ve managed to recapture the magic of the original? Do you feel Timothy Hutton’s absence diminishes the show? How about the new characters they’ve introduced?
There’s already a thread on this -
Leverage was always a fun and lighthearted show and featured a great ensemble cast with: Timothy Hutton playing the ‘mastermind’, Beth Riesgraf as the ‘thief’, Christian Kane as the ‘hitter’, Gina Bellman as the ‘grifter’ and Aldis Hodge as the ‘hacker’. So I was delighted when I heard they’ve started streaming the first half season of ‘Leverage: Redemption’.
What do you think of the show so far, do you think they’ve managed to recapture the magic of the original? Do you feel Timothy Hutton’s absence diminishes the show? How about the new characters they’ve introduced?
Finished the first 8. I’m missing Hardison a lot. Specifically, I’m missing the Hardison-Parker-Eliot chemistry and banter.
I like Breanna. She’s a lot like Hardison was at the beginning, only with less self-confidence. But hey, one does not simply step into Alec Hardison’s shoes.
Don’t care much about Harry. He’s good, but he’s not really Leverage good.
I most liked the card-game episode and the fake-mastermind episode. They were quirky enough to be fun and logical enough to make sense (once you understood what was happening). Plus, I liked the role of the Shkreli stand-in. I wanted to punch the dude, too.
Didn’t like the haunted house episode or the AI episode. The first was just dumb, and the second was boring.
Episode seven, The Double-Edged Sword Job, which is the AI one, was just badly written. It was a decent idea, very poorly executed.
Both written by the same writer.
More dumb than season 5? The Gimme a K Street Job, The DB Cooper Job, The Low Low Price Job, The Toy Job. Those were incredibly stupid.
Enduring the latter part of season five makes me more forgiving of weaker new episodes. 
It also recycled a lot of plot elements from Season 3, Episode 2, “The Reunion Job”, which I thought was a much cleverer implementation of the idea of hacking the programmer instead of the program.
The Halloween episode in particular really made me wonder about the production history of Redemption. IMDbTV has commercials, but not as many as broadcast TV or basic cable, and of course doesn’t have the arbitrary one-hour blocs. Yet Redemption seemed to be produced to fit that programming format. There were a couple of episodes with particularly jarring “commercial breaks” with no commercials. And the Halloween episode really seemed to be a standard old-school holiday-themed filler episode to be aired around the time of the holiday
And how could I forget the steaming pile of bullshit called “The (Very) Big Bird Job”?
I did. I’d completely wiped it from my mind. My god but that was dumb.
There’s a farm where they raise the Junior Varsity Team of TV stars, the reliable players you can’t necessarily name, but you’re glad they’re there. I know him from “The Librarians,” another lighthearted action-adventure series. Re-watching the first few there’s Rebecca Romjin (I cannot defy 8000 years of Northern European evolution because she kicks me right in the Viking solar plexus) and the woman with red hair, who reminds me yada yada yada.
ETA: And Max Headroom and a couple of people from Lucifer.
I realized he was “young Hub” in Secondhad Lions, long after I’d seen it. He who fights really really well. Of course he was!
I’ve started watching Almost Paradise, and it’s okay so far (three episodes in). Haven’t gotten to Secondhand Lions yet, but it’s on the list now.
I’ve also started rewatching the Redemption episodes. Now that I’m not on pins and needles about whether they’d completely bork the whole thing, I can slow down and analyze. I still like them the second time around.
I did notice that the overhead shot where they each walk away was used in the first episode while leaving Nate’s grave. I don’t think they’ve used it again since, and I’d be okay with that, leaving that final use as a tribute to Nathan Ford.
Finished this up last night, here are my thoughts:
- Knowing WHY they had to kill off Ford, it’s uncomfortable how much time they spend talking about how great he is. They seem to have book-ended it in the last episode so if they do another season hopefully they drop it.
- There’s a huge Hardison shaped hole after he leaves. Breanna is pretty meh. They need to have her stop doing voices on cons. Also, they introduced her as a “maker” and explain how hacking is last century. She then spends the rest of the season… hacking.
- Noah Wyle was the best addition, dropping accent aside. I was worried they were going to play the “newbie screws up” angle too much but he held his own.
- I’m glad they called back to “Sophie is a terrible actress unless she’s doing a con” in the card game episode.
- The finale of the original series implied Parker was the new leader. I’m disappointed they put her on the backburner and had Sophie take over.
- They teased in the last ep, but I really missed the “We provide…Leverage.”
I get that, but at the same time, the character is not the actor, and it would be really weird if they just memory-holed him. I suspect they’ll dial back the references in the back half of the season. But they spent 5 seasons with Nate’s grief over his son and his alcoholism being recurring elements. I think that sort of emotional realism, that people don’t just recover from devastating losses, trauma, and addictions over the course of one episode, or even six, juxtaposed against the fantasy competence porn of the heists, is key to why Leverage was such a great show.
Totally agree with all of that.
More than implied. That’s a running sub-plot through Season 5, that Nate is secretly testing and evaluating Parker, Eliot, and Hardison. Eliot confronts him about it. And Nate explicitly tells Parker she’s his choice to take over running the crew. He tells her that the way shes sees the world, seeing people and relationships as parts of a complex lock she can move around, is different than his approach, but it’s just as good. She’s going to make a great Mastermind. And then, in this revival, there’s no trace of that.
Bumping because the second half of the season dropped a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve now watched the whole season.
I thought the second half was…ok. It seemed like pretty solidly mediocre Leverage. Now, since I loved the original series, I think even mediocre Leverage is pretty good. But nothing truly outstanding.
I thought they did a better job with plotting and filming around COVID restrictions. Nothing nearly as bad as the empty rave in the first half of the season. But I also thought the lower budget showed through more. The production values were notably lacking at several points, especially with RIZ (supposedly high-end goons in cheap, ill-fitting suits; a global presentation in a hotel conference room with plastic chairs, etc.).
Still, it was nice to re-visit these characters, and I think they did a pretty good job with Harry’s character arc. I’d actually be interested in his spin-off, if they did one.
I finally finished up with the last half. The thing that surprised me most about the season in general was that I actually felt the absence of Nate Ford. I mean most people I suspect found Timothy Hutton’s character the least compelling of the original ensemble, so you’d think he’d be easy to replace by divvying up his role and usual plot functions among the others - which is essentially what the writers did. But I found that wheel squeaked loudly without his oil. The usual surprise stings at the end of stories where things appear to be going all wrong, but no it was part of the plan all along, felt oddly flat and somewhat unconvincing without Mastermind Nate Ford’s presence. I didn’t entirely realize the importance of his seemingly bread and butter role in the original series I guess.
But otherwise, like everyone else, I found myself missing the witty repartee between Hardison and Elliot most notably. Hardison’s substitute (Breanna) functioned well enough to move the stories forward, but was nowhere near as engaging of a character.
A couple of updates. Redemption has been approved for a second season, and the streaming channel it’s on, IMDB TV, has renamed itself to FreeVee.
…sorry for the bump and the late reply to this, but this isn’t correct. It was made clear in conversations that Parker is in charge of Leverage International. Parker’s the boss. She runs the entire show. Parker lets Sophie run this particular crew, but there are occasions (especially in the early parts of the first season of Redemption) where you can see people (especially Hardison) look to Parker for the final decision.
gdave flounced more than a year ago.