Brian Tyree Henry Shines in Uneven Apple TV+ Show

For a while, Apple TV+‘s adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s Dope Thief fits into one of my favorite subgenres of crime fiction: Longtime friends, bonded by shared trauma, engage in petty crime to survive, only to find themselves caught up in something bigger and more dangerous than they could have imagined.

Never quite a buddy comedy, but definitely a morbidly funny thriller fueled by economic desperation, Dope Thief gets off to an extremely promising start.

Stars Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura have the instant and volatile chemistry of men who have weathered so many dark moments together that they love each other even when they hate each other. Series creator Peter Craig has a good grasp on the obscenity-filled, vernacular-peppered language of this world. Pilot director Ridley Scott grounds the story in the urban grit of its Philadelphia and Philadelphia-adjacent locations.

The story in Dope Thief starts small and then things escalate and, in the process of escalation, the storytelling becomes more diffuse. There’s nothing wrong with a tale like this getting darker and bleaker as it goes along. But in splitting up its two main characters for most of its second half, Dope Thief loses its heart and its center, with what’s pushing the narrative forward from the fringes proving less and less interesting over the course of eight episodes.

But back to the beginning.

Ray (Henry) and Manny (Moura) have a solid racket going. With convincing DEA badges and vests, they stage well-planned busts on low-level drug houses, scoring cash. They call what they’re doing a “karma tax” for the dealers destroying neighborhoods and compare themselves to Robin Hood, even if it’s semi-accurately protested that they’re not giving the money to the poor.

Semi-accurately, because Ray and Manny, who both have criminal records and have battled addiction, are mighty poor themselves. Manny is tentatively moving forward on a life with girlfriend Sherry (Liz Caribel). Ray is living with Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), who isn’t his mother, but who helped support him after his abusive father (Ving Rhames‘ Bart) was sent to prison on a seemingly long-term bid for crimes unspecified.

The series starts in February of 2021 — explicitly post-January 6 insurrection, but still in the sway of the pandemic — and opportunities for men with their skillset are limited.

Manny tries protesting that what they’re doing is just a side hustle, but as Ray responds, “Yeah, well it’s not a side hustle when it’s your only source of income.”

Welcome, then, to the gig economy.

Their next gig is offered by a former prison buddy (Spenser Granese’s Ricky), who alerts them to a seemingly sedate meth cookhouse in the country. It provides them with potentially high reward for low risk.

The risk ends up not being so low. Lives are lost, and although Ray and Manny make off with a lot of money, they’re immediately pursued by actual DEA agents (Amir Arison’s Nader and Will Pullen’s Marchetti, mostly), as well as the vicious biker gang hired by a mysterious man whom they only talk to on the phone — a man who sounds like Richard Nixon doing a Boston accent, and who will do whatever it takes to wipe these petty cons off the map.

Scott, who has been prolific as a TV producer but not as an episodic director, delivers a tease of a pilot. It isn’t that it’s so epic and flashy that nothing can compete, but when you have Ridley Scott directing and Erik Messerschmidt shooting, there’s a look and precision to the first hour that subsequent hours — directed by the likes of Jonathan van Tulleken and Marcela Said — can’t replicate. That’s not the same as “can’t equal,” but if a pilot is a template, this one is only broadly followed. If I hadn’t been sold on the pilot, maybe I wouldn’t have been disappointed by Dope Thief, but it was my favorite episode, with no clear runner-up.

In its smarter moments, Dope Thief feels like a parallel text to Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, a 2012 crime thriller that was viewed as a dud when it premiered, but has since been reexamined as a harsh critique of the anxiety following the 2008 financial crisis. Here, concerns about COVID aren’t related to health but rather to the economic ripples; Ray and Manny’s ill-fated big score arises from the supply chain interruptions that hindered legitimate and illegitimate businesses alike. The paranoia and claustrophobia of the post-pandemic moment are among the catalysts for a drama in which all the characters have been backed into corners for so long that they’re prepared to do stupid and uncharacteristic things to escape.

It makes for a murky but potent brew that ends up spread too thin. Once various conspiratorial layers were added, plus pointless ephemera like side plots relating to the Pennsylvania Dutch, I lost almost all interest in what Ray and Manny had stumbled into. And that was long before an annoying anticlimactic introduction, and then dispatching, of a big bad who might as well not be named.

The decision not to give any of the institutional figures in the series — DEA agents and other law enforcement folks — even vague characterizations wouldn’t be so bad, except that they’re clogging up half the series at times. I could tell you nothing about Arison’s Mark and Pullen’s Marchetti other than that one goes to the gym and one doesn’t understand cultural references. And that’s it for their characters. The exception is Marin Ireland’s Mina, who has an early brush with death that leaves her whispering and irritated for the rest of the series, and lets Ireland play a zero-patience intensity (and wry humor) that the series desperately needs.

There’s just too much time spent with all of these people who clearly aren’t the series. The series is Henry and Moura, bantering and bickering and watching things spiral out of control.

Boiling over with exasperation and facing constant reminders (and flashbacks) to the youthful decision that ruined his life, Ray is a part that shows Henry is more than capable of carrying a show on his own, or with an equal partner. Moura, brimming with nervous discomfort and hopeful idealism that you just know is going to get dashed, is excellent, but when the characters split up, Manny is mostly just gone. That leaves Henry sharing scenes with characters who are well-played but thin (Mulgrew’s loving, determined Theresa); tantalizing but insufficiently developed (there’s a whole show that could be made about Dustin Nguyen’s Son Pham); simply insufficiently developed (Nesta Cooper’s Michelle, a lawyer/unconvincing love interest); or insufficiently utilized (Rhames is great every second he’s on-screen, which isn’t nearly often enough).

Even when frustratedly unsupported by the characters opposite him and the situations around him, Henry remains uncommonly good. It’s a performance that taps into how funny he was in Atlanta, how heartbreaking he was in Causeway and how fierce-yet-cool he’s been in multiple other projects. There’s a half of Dope Thief that I thought was pulpy, entertaining and unpredictable and a half of Dope Thief that I thought was unfocused, glum and familiar. But Henry is a star throughout.