Dope Thief Pulls It Off

Watching the sharply written, chummily acted, assertively detailed Dope Thief is like stepping into a time machine transporting us back to the early days of FX’s golden age. Fuckup men having feelings, what a concept!

Fifteen or so years ago, the channel was the place for just-guys-being-dudes masterpieces like The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Justified, and Terriers, series in which men’s personal and professional relationships were given distinct texture and emotional depth amid backdrops of organized crime, drug wars, and land grabs. Glossy prestige TV was in its heyday, but an FX show usually felt more grimy, violent, and vulgar than those of its basic-cable peers, with a distinct sense of place and guiding theories about how the American experiment is bound to grind the lower classes into dust. Apple TV+, which trends more toward big-budget sci-fi, earnest masculinity, and girlboss-y prestige, is a surprising place to find Dope Thief, but thank you to the streamer for housing this nostalgia! This series, the first two episodes of which premiere today, isn’t just an homage to a particular kind of aggro programming. Dope Thief enlivens the formula with a pair of performances from Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura that plunge us into the depths of male loneliness, then pull us out of the dark with a tender, vulnerable friendship that is as gooey and soft as the show surrounding it is bleak and bloody.

Adapted from the book of the same name by Dennis Tafoya (whose specialty is thrillers and noirs set in Philadelphia, reminiscent of Dennis Lehane’s bond with Boston, S. A. Cosby’s with Virginia, and Jordan Harper’s with California), Dope Thief immediately drops us into its North Philly setting. The premiere, directed by executive producer Ridley Scott, sets the series’ drafty, desaturated palette; introduces its use of black-and-white flashback sequences; and lays out most of the crime story’s main players, starting with longtime best friends Ray (Henry) and Manny (Moura). For 14 months, the two have been posing as DEA agents to rip off low-level drug dealers, pocketing the stolen money and flipping the product through their boss, Son (Dustin Nguyen, in a delightful against-type casting choice given his 21 Jump Street history). Being around drugs is personally dangerous for both Ray and Manny: Ray’s father, Bart (Ving Rhames), was an addict who ruined Ray’s childhood with his using, while Manny has a weakness for heroin. But the trade is seemingly North Philly’s only economy, and Dope Thief treats that as matter-of-factly as The Wire did. Onetime industrial towns are dying, and this is their rebirth, through other people’s ruin — do you have any better ideas?

It all seems to be going well for Ray and Manny until, of course, one last job pulls them in. Ray’s adoptive mother, Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), needs $10,000 for a mysterious reason she won’t share, but she raised him after Bart went to prison and he’ll do anything for her; Henry and Mulgrew gnaw at each other with brittle affection. Manny wants to get engaged to his girlfriend, Sherry (Liz Caribel Sierra), despite Ray’s dislike of her, because he wants the consistency of a settled-down life. So the two end up in a meth kitchen in rural Pennsylvania, where everything about their faux-bust goes wrong. After a shoot-out and an explosion, now-murderers Ray and Manny have two enemies on their tail: undercover DEA agent Mina (Marin Ireland), furious and heartbroken over the pair ruining her bust, and a mysteriously Boston-accented villain who threatens everyone Ray and Manny love if they don’t give back the $400,000 in cash and gallons of liquid meth they stole. As the best friends are squeezed on both sides — by the government thanks to Mina, and racist biker gangs and cartel assassins thanks to the Voice — Dope Thief follows their volatile friendship, which inches closer and closer to total collapse once it becomes clear that they may need to turn on each other to survive.

This is a genre work and ticks all the genre boxes. Ray and Manny have allies they can’t trust, the DEA has its own selfish agenda, and Ray has a dead girlfriend haunting his conscience. Relapse is alluring, Bart is intimidating, and Son is mysterious. Flashbacks fill us in on the police brutality Bart endured, and an episode in which Ray has a drug freakout is shot with blurry fuzziness and a shaky cam. Dope Thief knows the formula it’s working with, and it solves that math problem like it’s Cady Heron realizing the limit does not exist. All of that is to say the series’ specialness isn’t in its plotting or even its many action sequences, which are cogently edited to convey the increasingly high stakes. (For all my Guy Ritchie–coded freaks, there’s a moment when Son wears a track suit and a signet ring and takes out some baddies with an AK-15; it is very attractive in that “This would be repellent in real life, but it’s fun onscreen” way.) Instead, what sets Dope Thief apart is its crackly dialogue, which fizzes with cultural references and nods to characters’ hidden desires.

Most of these details are ancillary to the main narrative, such as Ray’s irritation that he can’t identify the song used for a dead thug’s ringtone, Bart’s admission that he hasn’t tasted fresh zucchini in a decade, and Son’s sharing that his uncle was killed in Vietnam for cooperating with the CIA. But these moments give the actors a chance to explore their characters’ internal lives and pad out their relationships so all the drama of this drug deal gone wrong has personal weight. Theresa snapping at Ray that he’s not like Robin Hood because he didn’t give away his stolen money, and his exasperated reply that “I give it to you, and you are very, very poor,” has all the bluster of a mother-son duo who spend too much time together. Rhames has a perfect deadpan for lines like “Casual Friday” when Ray asks why he’s wearing a robe during their prison visit. The series’ most revealing dialogue is tucked inside Ray and Manny’s endless bickering, whether they’re arguing about which one has taken care of the other for longer or scoffing at a group of white Pennsylvania Dutch farmers calling them, a Black man and a Brazilian immigrant, “English.” Henry and Moura are usually yelling at each other, but the former is so good at being simultaneously exasperated and concerned, and the latter so skillful at veering between freneticism and compassion, that their antagonism always comes off as a form of love.

As in so many shows about big conspiracies, Dope Thief’s pacing gets a bit jagged toward the end of its eight episodes. A couple of major twists seem to come out of nowhere, and Mina’s plan for how to work with Ray and Manny gets fairly convoluted. (To be fair, though, that just makes Dope Thief even more evocative of an FX joint; what was every Sons of Anarchy finale if not an onslaught of surprise reveals that somehow neatly tied up all the preceding drama?) But Dope Thief’s cast is so strong, and their handling of the series’ innate tonal conflict so masterful, that the pacing issues don’t overwhelm. “I don’t know what’s worse, old wounds or new wounds,” Ray says in one of the show’s best hard-boiled lines, evoking Dope Thief’s greatest appeal: how it makes those old wounds feel new.