Thick with Thieves

(2 of 3)

"As dramatists, you make a pact with your audience that you don't cross certain lines, and we don't," says Mark Cullen. Heist's crooks don't kill--in the pilot, they foil a murder--and they take, Robin Hood-- like, only from the rich. (So they skip the give-to-the-poor bit. Nobody's perfect!) In fact, Heist's greatest crime is robbing innocent movies of their clichés: the Tarantino-gone-PG banter, the whooshing camera shots, the generic peppy jazz that sounds as if it were lifted from a Putumayo Presents Lighthearted Caper Music of the World CD.

For the first few minutes, FX's Thief (Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) seems to be in the same jaunty, crime's-a-spree mold. As in Heist, we begin with a wisecracking crew getting ready to take down a cache of jewels--"Just say no to blow, kids," quips ringleader Nick (Andre Braugher) as he blasts open a vault. But the game quickly gets heavy, and the story more gripping: along the way, Nick's crew finds and steals a pile of cash that turns out to belong to the Chinese Mafia. Revenge is sought, friends turn on each other, and people are killed brutally.

Braugher is a surprising choice as Nick, since he has been closely associated with upstanding types like cops and doctors (Homicide, Gideon's Crossing). But, Braugher insists, "Nick is an honorable character"--in his own way. Unlike Tony Soprano, he is unselfish and has tightly circumscribed rules--don't let emotion get in the way of business, don't rob anyone who won't be made whole by insurance--and he's an attentive family man. In the middle of the first robbery, he takes a cell-phone call from his stepdaughter's school. But when his men break one rule--don't deviate from the plan--his carefully constructed partitions crumble, and the chaos threatens both his crew and his family.

"Thief is about the moral choices of immoral men," says creator Norman Morrill, which is why he cast Braugher. It's a well-observed, sometimes too somber character study, its Southern-gothic mournfulness underscored not just by Braugher's tough, sad performance but also by the setting: post-Katrina New Orleans, littered with abandoned cars and LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT signs spray-painted on plywood. (The show was set and the pilot shot in the city a year before the hurricane.) Like his town, Nick has to restore order from the rubble, and it's not a glamorous job. "This is the anti-Ocean's Eleven," says Morrill. "I wanted this show to be about middle-class guys. We're not all criminals, but what makes us men is how we choose to stand--how we meet those things that are hard for all of us."

The show doesn't strain the Katrina parallels, but it's unsurprisingly tempting to tie crime stories to class and social conditions--to look at the why of crime where CSI has peered through its microscope at the how. NBC's The Black Donnellys, debuting in the fall, comes from the writers of the Oscar-winning message movie Crash and tells the story of four brothers drawn into the Irish Mob. "They live in a world against impossible odds," says co-creator Bobby Moresco, who loosely based the show, with co-creator Paul Haggis, on his New York City childhood.