Sneaky Pete (Seasons 1-3)
I am not normally a fan of heist shows. Almost always, either they are annoyingly predictable, or avoid that only by pulling plot developments out of left field, equally annoying. But when I saw Bryan Cranston and David Shore were the people who created Sneaky Pete, and that Cranston wrote the first season, I decided to give it a shot.
Good call! Thanks to the clever writing and stellar cast, Sneaky Pete pretty well transcends the limitations of its ostensible genre.
Pete gets out of jail into a sticky situation engendered by his no-good brother and has to hide, so he decides to impersonate his former cellmate whose family runs a bail bond agency in a small town in the countryside outside New York City. Fortunately for his survival, Pete is good at improvisation and manages to mostly convince most of his ‘new family’ that he really is their brother. But of course the bad guys are on Pete’s trail, and eventually his old gang of con artists are involved too.
The characters are complex, only stereotypical or simplistic if that is made necessary by the plot. Best of all, many of them, especially the ‘family’ members, are often unaware of their own motivations, making for juicy developments. For a few episodes in the second and third seasons, Sneaky Pete did get a little ‘heisty’ for my taste, but I am still looking forward to a fourth season if there is one.
I also wanted to mention the excellent music. Make sure you listen all the way through to the closing credits, where the music is good enough that I was compelled to make the effort to find out who the musicians were, and have added some of them to the mental list I watch out for.
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