Less than a week after NBC debuted Heist, a drama following one elaborate robbery over 13 episodes, FX counters with Thief (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.), a darker, more intricate and simply better take on a very similar concept. The excellent Andre Braugher stars as a New Orleans master criminal whose personal and professional lives are equally rich and complicated. Like FX's Rescue Me, Thief offers fascinating characters who are defined by far more than their jobs. While Heist is focused on flashy setups and snappy dialogue, Thief, which also follows one big score over the course of its season, is more about delving into the psyches of its characters, all of whom have more depth than those on their network counterpart.
FX is billing Thief as a "limited-order" series and has only scheduled six episodes, but the show has plenty of potential to support an ongoing existence. Faced with a hurricane-ravaged setting after shooting only one episode, the producers have deftly integrated the post-Katrina reality of New Orleans into their narrative, using the damaged city as an effective metaphor for the damaged lives of their characters. Braugher brings a great deal of depth and complexity to his character, a man trying to do right by his family even as he does some morally questionable things. You can see the wheels turning in his conflicted mind whenever he deals with his teenage stepdaughter, torn between what's best for her and what's best for his business. The supporting cast, including Clifton Collins Jr. and Linda Hamilton, is also excellent.
The first episode does feature an unfortunately clichéd twist, and there are times when the show dips into tired crime drama devices. It does this far less than almost any other show on the air, though, and if allowed to run beyond its initial six episodes, could end up doing for thieves what The Sopranos has done for the mob.
Proving that crappy mini-series are not unique to America, Sci Fi this week imports the abysmal fantasy epic Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (March 28 & 29, 8 p.m.). Originally produced in 2004 for German TV (though featuring several British and American actors and dialogue in English), Dark Kingdom is inspired by the European folktales that served as the basis for Richard Wagner's famous operatic Ring cycle, and was originally shown under the title Ring of the Nibelung. Sci Fi has both misleadingly retitled it and dubiously promoted it as a source for Lord of the Rings, both of which seem like desperate gambits to cover up the fact that they've got a serious stinker on their hands.
Star Benno Furman wears a perpetually dazed expression as Siegfried, the hero who slays a dragon and is torn between two women, and Kristanna Loken and Alicia Witt are wooden and whiny, respectively, as his dueling love interests. Anyone drawn in by the ads and hoping for a sweeping battle between good and evil is going to be sorely disappointed, since the story actually takes place on a much smaller scale. It's far more about annoying, unsympathetic idiots than it is about adventure or intrigue. Even the dragon-slaying occurs relatively early in the first part and is not the focus of the story.
The special effects are cut-rate, the dialogue is laughable and the plot, while perhaps appropriate for an opera or a fairy tale, comes off as ludicrous when played serious and straightforward. Julian Sands (as the scheming villain) and Max von Sydow (as Siegfried's adopted blacksmith father) come off well only because they are so thoroughly schooled in making atrocious dialogue into campy entertainment. Other than those two, though, no one in the cast seems to understand how incredibly stupid the script is, and there's not nearly enough camp to make the four-hour slog (two hours each over two nights) remotely worthwhile.