‘Leverage: Redemption’ serves up more karmic justice in 2nd season
The scammers keep scamming. And so the hackers, cat burglars and con artists of the Leverage crew have saddled up once again to balance the scales. Back for a second season on Amazon Freevee, the team on “Leverage: Redemption” stares corruption jauntily in the eye and says: Make my day.
I’ve always admired this thematic approach, in part because it’s such a rarity. Networks tend to prefer wealth-aganda, swamping us with TV series that poke fun at the rich but are fundamentally about centering their angst and woes while delicately sidestepping how those fortunes were amassed and the unscrupulous systems that make them possible.
The show is built around a delicious premise: heists with a wink — and a heart. Has someone been wronged by a rich person who is plundering and destroying people’s lives in order to pad out their net worth? Then the Leverage team will swoop in with an elaborate caper while cracking wise. The goal? Karmic justice. The schemes are implausible but that’s embedded in the show’s lighthearted approach.
“Leverage” may not rise to the definition of prestige TV, but it’s enormous fun with a knowing sense of humor about itself. That’s perhaps why the very in-demand Aldis Hodge (now also the star of Showtime’s “City on a Hill” as well as the blockbuster film “Black Adam”) made time to return for an episode or two.
But season two also reveals the limits of “Leverage’s” wish-fulfillment, which even the show acknowledges. The
gang plots to shut down a smuggler’s operation that has been dumping garbage in the ocean. Breanna, the youngest member of the team (Aleyse Shannon), pauses midway through their planning session to point out that going after this one bad dude won’t make much of a dent in the problem: “It’s the corporations — they’re going to keep making plastic and that plastic is going to keep ending up as pollution, so why are we not going after them?”
To which the wisened grifter Sophie (Gina Bellman) responds: “This team can’t solve the world’s bigger problems. We’re not built for it. What we can do is help one person — and then the next, and then the next. And then we look back and you see how much you’ve changed. It’s baby steps.”
Only three episodes were provided to critics, so it’s possible that as the season goes on, the team’s ambitions deepen.
As it is, their targets in the first few episodes are fantastical — a dictator from an Eastern European nation in one, an antiquities smuggler in another — rather than plain old capitalists exploiting and screwing
over everyday people as a matter of course. As a matter of business.
Shall we talk about the elephant in the room? “Leverage” is produced by Amazon. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently announced he plans to donate his personal wealth, somewhere in the neighborhood of
$124 billion, to charitable causes. The news came the same day that Amazon announced it would be laying off 10,000 employees. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
“Leverage” can probably only go so far in its critiques before raising the hackles of someone up the food chain at Amazon. That’s true, I’d imagine, of any show or movie made by an entertainment conglomerate.
We can’t rely on TV and film to inspire us into collective action, but the media we consume do shape how we see the world — and whether or not we can envision what it takes to bring about meaningful change.
One of the primary roles of fiction — even escapist TV — is to actually ponder some of those ideas.