Review of Nemesis – a police thriller full of The Wire stars | TV crime drama

DIsaiah Stiles (Matthew Law) is very dedicated to his work, but it does not make him satisfied. The long hours he devotes to breaking crime with the LAPD have distracted his son and angered his wife, Candace (Gabrielle Dennis), to the point where Isaiah sleeps in the summer house. They are forever pissed off. But he wasn’t supposed to be happy: he’s a maverick cop.

The maverick-copness of its protagonist is the first of many crime shows to be unashamedly expressed by Nemesis, the first Netflix show from writer Courtney A Kemp, creator of crime drama Power and its various spins. Isaiah has the pain of a past crime where his young friend was killed while chasing a group of elite thieves: now, every time a robbery descends on Los Angeles – and the big one has just happened, with bags of money being shamelessly chased from the highest party games – Isaiah suspects that his white whale, the man who shot him years ago, is the one who pulled it off. To the surprise of his friends, he has a whiteboard in his office with pictures and sticky notes.

If that wasn’t enough to give him enough attention, Isaiah is also fighting to escape the shadow of his father, Amos (Moe Irvin), a convicted felon whose crime spree killed Isaiah’s brother. Amos is selfish, delusional and a threat to his family – Isaiah is not like him! He is not!

After a little investigative work, Isaiah concludes that the pursuit of poker and jewelry is the work of the group he has been following all along – and that they are led by a respected pillar of the black business community, Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel). The lack of hard evidence means that Isaiah may lose his gun and badge if he insists on Coltrane’s guilt, but he knows he’s right and so do we, since we’ve seen Coltrane command heists.

After Isaiah tells Coltrane about his plan to take him down, Nemesis is not a police show, it’s a battle of wits between alpha males with similar cars but different behaviors – almost a direct remake of Heat. It is not abominable to put the obvious parts of the story of the criminal king in hiding, without a judge who can not convince anyone of the guilt of the boy: if you have seen similar stories before you expect that the wives of the two men will be friends by accident, and this happens.

What matters, however, is not how innovative your show’s construction is. That’s what you build with and, after you’ve established all of the above in two episodes, Nemesis goes on, plot-wise, to go wrong. It gets better as it goes on, layering on infidelity, unexpected partnerships, slow loyalty or exchange, risks taken and raised. (The boss who oversees Coltrane’s crimes is his brother-in-law! Amos’ criminal career may not be over! There’s a mole in the LAPD!) Concerns about the cheesiness of the establishment or the occasional wooden music melt away as the heists escalate, Isaiah gets closer to the elimination of the conspiracy.

Law and Noel are strong leads, Noel smooth and invisible as a person who can be right to believe that his mistakes will go unpunished, because he is very good and capable, and Law – better known as O’Shon the IT guy from Abbott Elementary – sees a parallel between Isaiah and the manic sitcom protcom but who always sees the wrong.

Nemesis is a fun first-person shooter, though: as a cops-and-robbers drama, it’s not exactly The Wire. Except that in later episodes it’s like, because the esteemed Wire alumni keep going. Toward the end we have Chris Bauer (Frank Sobotka!) as a disgusted senior cop, Domenick Lombardozzi (Herc!) as a struggling New York cop recruited to help us, and Michael Potts (Brother Mouzone!) as Isaiah’s old-school grumpy driver, all in the same room. Potts is delightful as the grumpy boss, telling Isaiah all the time with cute descriptions of his ass. After a dramatic street shootout leaves everyone’s careers in jeopardy, Potts delivers the best “deep” metaphor any TV cop has ever told.

Some comedic moments show that Nemesis knows how to be silly. And because it judges its levels of confusion perfectly, it’s ridiculously fun.