4 out of 5

Created by: J Blakeson

Heist movies are difficult. The template of a team pulling off some derring-do requires much balancing: of character, of tone, and of how much disbelief to suspend. This has undoubtedly gotten more difficult in a post Soderbergh Ocean’s Eleven-world, which arguably threw down a generations-long gauntlet on how to do all of the above “right,” and given all those stakes for keeping a 90-120 minute movie compelling, I’d say it all gets that much tougher if you try to extend that to a TV show format – say, the eight episodes of Culprits.

On the one hand, you get more room to negotiate the juggling – which the show uses, excellently, to manage pacing without much bloat, and to dig into character in relevant ways – on the other hand, there’s all that room for attentions to wander, which can make the softer parts of any script, movie or show, more apparent. Culprits tries to work around that by keeping the ante upped repeatedly, and it mostly works, but I can accept if one’s tolerance of how far they’re willing to go with that is broken by a certain point. I do think, though, that the show waits a good while – say halfway through – before committing such sins, making it easier to be committed by that point, which a practically perfect first half leading you in. And I’d say what kept me on the positive side of things is that the core story aspects – the Why of it all; and how the characters are intertwined with that – felt very earned and thought through, with the writers and creator J Blakeson not mincing on the weight of everyone’s decisions.

But we start without really knowing anything about the heist: with the uneven but loving relationship between parents Joe (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and Jules (Kevin Vidal), with the latter trying to balance a budget and planning for their upcoming wedding while the former keeps striking out and securing a grant for opening a restaurant – Joe, a black man, notably being turned down by four old white men, who keeps vaguely chattering about his intended business bringing down the tone of the neighborhood.

This, initially, is what Culprits is about, and promisingly, Stewart-Jarrett’s soulful performance sells it as-is, no heist needed. So when mentions of neighborhood renovations send Joe out, in the middle of the night, to dig up a bagful of money, our already-held interest gets spiked even higher. Then, the show seems to be about Joe’s almost comedic attempts at keeping that bagful of money, which is complicated by his witnessing a hit and run, and the troubles his witness statement brings… Oh, but wait: what are we to make of the gory, colorfully shot shooting of a man in a mansion, running from a masked killer? Right, that opened the show.

There’s a lot pinging around here, and Culprits necessarily plays cagily with the details, but not in a cheap way: it feels like we understand what’s needed to give each scene relevance, and while it might be described as a series of twists, it never negates what came before. And the pacing is tasteful with it, not slowing up the present – which turns into, essentially, an eight episode cat-and-mouse – to catch us up on the past: the modern day stuff is absolutely our focus.

Explaining how Gemma Arterton, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Niamh Algar and others fit into this is a bit spoilery, but just as we start from a human position and then expand the scope, the same is true for their arcs: everyone arrives pretty three dimensional, and it just gets more nuanced from there. Howell-Baptists and Algar, in particular, stand equal with Stewart-Jarrett in making us never want to turn away while they’re on screen.

…Meanwhile, there’s that suspension of disbelief. There is a character who’s one dimensional, and while it makes sense within the story being told, if you zoom out, this feels like an embellishment without much benefit: the character exists to be a bogeyman, which doesn’t function correctly in a cinematic universe that’s otherwise aiming for the real-world fallouts of the Whys and Hows of that bag of money. And there are absolutely points where keeping everyone on a hamster wheel requires slight of hand which is arguably unconvincing. Thankfully, these moments are very sparsely applied, and are normally backed up / buffered by some emotional performances.

Overall, though, Culprits is an accomplishment, and might be the mic drop for the episodic version of a heist.