Thick with Thieves

Before taking a bullet in the first episode of this season of The Sopranos, mob boss Tony Soprano was at the top of his game: secure in his business, flush with income, gorging on expensive sushi. When it comes to the TV-crime business, Tony has largely been the unchallenged boss too. Television has occasionally featured wrongfully accused men (The Fugitive) or misunderstood rogues (The Dukes of Hazzard), but TV has mainly been a good guys' zone. Now there are people gunning for Tony in the TV biz as well; the medium is in the middle of a full-blown love affair with crooks. And we're not just talking Martha Stewart.

Two shows this spring introduce viewers to the world of high-stakes thievery, while series on tap for summer and fall look sympathetically at petty crooks and mobsters. Next year, Michael C. Hall, formerly of Six Feet Under, plays a serial killer on Showtime. He used to slab 'em. Now he'll stab 'em.

The Sopranos has undoubtedly influenced those projects. Its sixth-season debut drew 9.5 million viewers--not huge by network standards, but all paying customers. "It showed us that audiences could connect to a guy so deeply flawed as to be a murderer," says NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly. The networks have tried and failed to emulate it before: CBS with Falcone in 2000, NBC with Mexican-mob drama Kingpin in 2003.

In the meantime, however, there has been a wave of TV cop shows, in the CSI and Law & Order molds, that may have reached viewers' saturation point. And in the past few years, broadcast and basic-cable networks have gradually introduced flawed, even criminal protagonists to all kinds of shows: the antiheroes of FX's The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me; the cruelly sarcastic doctor on House; and the castaways of Lost, who include a heroin addict, a torturer and several killers. (Fox's Prison Break is also set among criminals, although it's about a wrongfully imprisoned man and the brother who is trying to spring him from jail.) "Mainstream audiences are now getting comfortable with the fact that there are different kinds of lead characters," says Reilly.

There are also different kinds of criminals, not all of them in Tony's league--feloniously or dramatically. The high-class burglars in NBC's Heist (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), planning to take down a Beverly Hills jewelry store, fall into the Ocean's Eleven school of fast-talking, ice-cool swells. (Hustle, a British import nearing the end of its season on AMC, takes a similar tack with a band of con artists.) The robbers (led by Dougray Scott and The Practice's Steve Harris) gab about strippers and Mother Teresa while on a job; the cops who chase them self-consciously reference Lethal Weapon. Created by brothers Mark and Robb Cullen and co-executive-produced by Doug Liman, who directed Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Heist takes a lighthearted tone familiar from the movies--assuring viewers that they're in safe territory.

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