The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Breaking even: why we love heist dramas
The team behind crime thriller Culprits explain the evolving social conscience that marks the genre
Most television obeys the law. In crime dramas, which seem to make up the lion’s share of all scripted television, the cops get their man, the bad guys get banged up, and we can all go to bed knowing the order of things has been restored – crime doesn’t pay, kids.
Except when it does. Heist dramas are that exception to the rule. From The Great Train Robbery, at the very dawn of cinema, to The Taking of Pelham 123 via The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven to Thirteen (and back to 8) and on to television’s current obsession with someone getting one over on someone else and stealing literal truckloads of money (see Money Heist, Lupin, Kaleidoscope, Berlin, The Gold), heist drama is the genre that’s above the law.
The latest, Disney+’s Culprits, is a postmodern heist show so steeped in heistiness that it assumes the viewer knows heist-drama lore backwards. Indeed, the series takes place in reverse, beginning by catching up with the various gang members three years after they broke into a secret vault and ran off with someone else’s loot.
From there, Culprits takes all of your favourite heist conceits and upends them. Joe (Nathan StewartJarrett) was the muscle in the hit (all of the gang members have code names; his is Muscle) and as such is precisely the kind of figure who usually gets bumped off early in the piece. In Culprits, he’s the main character, now living a happy family life in America under an assumed identity, but who once took orders from smooth-talking criminal mastermind Dianne (Gemma Arterton). Dianne (code name: Brain), for her part, is another piece of anti-heist drama machinery in that she’s a woman.
“I went through an odyssey of watching heist films when I was preparing for this,” says Arterton. “There are definitely things that as a viewer you kind of hope for: I watched the original Taking of Pelham 123, which has the original code names – Mr Green, Mr Black, Mr Brown. I mean, watching a whole load of heists, there have been heist leaders who are women… but like, maybe, twice.”
Planning and execution are always vital parts of heist drama, because the viewer knows that man plans and the gods laugh. Yet Culprits flips that script, too, showing instead, through a series of flashbacks, that the plan worked. At least until a man in a hockey mask appears a few years later and starts tracking down the team one by one.
It would spoil Culprits to explain why – suffice to say that underpinning the narrative is a tale of natural justice and restitution. There is, ultimately, a greater evil than the people with guns blasting goons and stealing money. In this, Culprits sits squarely in the heist-drama calculus of rectitude, which says that we will root for people doing bad things if they’re done for a just cause.
Stephen Garrett, Culprits’ executive producer, is something of a heist specialist, having also worked on the BBC drama Hustle (as well as Spooks and The Night Manager). Hustle lionised a gang of con artists pulling off repeated mug jobs.
“You’re dealing with a bunch of crooks, people who are breaking the law,” he says. “And you realise the rule is quite simple, which is just make sure that they’re more charming and likeable than the people from whom they’re stealing. If they’re stealing from people who are worse, then you’re fine. They can actually behave quite badly – and they do – as long as at the end of the rainbow there’s a bigger bad.”
The big bad, the target of the heist, varies across the decades, depending on the bogeyman or looming societal ill of the age. The Great Train Robbery (1903) saw the railroad as a repository of faceless riches; by the 1950s, in Jules Dassin’s classic Rififi, jewels are seen as something that can be stolen without harm – the plaything of people so rich they wouldn’t really miss them. This in turn led to heist flicks as a critique of capitalism in general – in Michael Mann’s 1981 Thief, ace safecracker James Caan tells his mark: “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labour.”
Television has taken up the mantle – this year’s The Gold, set in the real-world 1980s, was a commentary on class structure in Thatcher’s Britain, while Money Heist’s target is the Bank of Spain – a suggestion that the state itself is diddling the individual, and these have-a-go heroes are simply getting their money back.
What, then, is the biggest bad imaginable in Britain in 2023? “I think the bar has been set quite low with our political classes,” says
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