Why is the Apple TV+’s newest mini-series, “Dope Thief,” eight episodes long? It’s a question I found myself asking throughout the prolonged runtime of Peter Craig’s Philadelphia-set crime series. This is not to say that the show is bad. It’s really not. Craig— a novelist and screenwriter best known as co-writer on both “The Town” and Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” — knows how to tell a pulpy, street-level tale about losers and hustlers scraping by through any means necessary. Here, adapting Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel, he also has a compelling hook.
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It’s about two thieves, Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura), who have worked out a lucrative scam. They both pose as DEA agents, knocking over low-level stash houses, taking the money and drugs and getting out of there before anyone realizes that backup isn’t coming. The pilot’s first scene establishes the high that Ray and Manny get off of this con. Both addicts are in varying stages of recovery; they can make some money and actually feel like they are contributing, knowing that they are only stealing from dealers.
However, once a third joins their group—an unpredictable prison friend of Ray’s who promises a lucrative payday outside the inner city— all hell breaks loose. A botched robbery with multiple dead bodies and way more money and drugs than they anticipated serves as the impetus for the following seven episodes, which sees Manny and Ray frantically try to escape the various factions searching for the drugs and money, including a biker gang, the cartel, and federal agents.
If the first episode proves to be an exhilarating introduction to these characters and their escalating predicament, the rest of the episodes are too often content to spin their wheels. It also doesn’t help that Ridley Scott directs the first episode with the type of muscular staging that, frankly, has been missing from his recent big-screen output, while the rest of the show never matches that type of propulsion.
Instead, as we move further away from the robbery – with episodes stretching weeks into the future —we are given endless backstories on the various characters that populate the screen outside of Manny and Ray. Ray’s stand-in mother, Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), for example, is a compelling peripheral character but is pushed further into the narrative center as Ray tries to get her out of the blast radius of the robbery. The same goes for Ray’s incarcerated father, Bart (Ving Rhames), who’s brought into the narrative in such a convoluted way that it strains credulity like much of the back half of the show.
Not that “Dope Thief” is exactly rooted in reality or takes itself seriously, anyway. Craig, who writes every episode, is willing to inject humor to juxtapose Ray’s frantic attempts to control the situation. Much of that humor comes from his shocking ability to survive despite being hunted by seemingly every white supremacist in the Northeast. On the other hand, Manny disappears for long stretches of time despite the show ostensibly being centered around their unbreakable friendship.
While Moura is incredible as a man fracturing under the weight of his decisions, this is really Tyree Henry’s show. The shrewdness he showcased so memorably in “Atlanta” is on full display here as he toggles quickly between desperation and confidence. Perhaps having play-acted as a cop too many times has made Ray a bit overconfident about his abilities to navigate rival gangs and the feds breathing down his neck. But with so much of the show centered around his increasingly frustrated ways of getting away, it helps that Tyree Henry plays up Ray’s bewilderment.
But, at the same time, the show goes on too long, content with recycling how Ray gets away from the psychotic bikers. They are so omnipresent that anyone else would’ve been dead or in jail by the middle of the second episode. We never get the sense that he’s surviving because of an acquired skill set but, more so, because Craig has more episodes to fill, and the narrative requires Ray to be alive.
More grounded is the show’s B-plot following Marin Ireland’s undercover federal agent Mina, who was present at the stash-house that Ray and Manny robbed, and works to figure out who was responsible for the liquid meth that was there and why so many people are trying to get their hands on Ray. The answers to those questions are less compelling than the first episode makes them seem. The reveal of the cartel’s big boss in the final episode is one of the least shocking twists in recent memory.
But, even if “Dope Thief” isn’t fully watertight as a crime thriller, it’s still a tour-de-force for Tyree Henry, who keeps this show watchable even in its most absurd moments. It’s a cliche at this point to suggest that a show should’ve been a movie, mainly because Craig has obviously designed this show with episodes in mind. Each episode has a clear arc, but as we move closer to the eight-hour mark, one can’t help but wonder if some of these subplots could’ve been trimmed. [B-]
