Apple TV’s Dope Thief, an eight-episode adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s Philadelphia-set crime novel of the same name, is bracingly chaotic, much of its action perpetrated in the heat of the moment or by outright accident. At the same time, it’s another unfortunate example of streaming bloat. The series is exceptionally well-made, but it never lets you lose sight of the tighter, more economical story that could have been.
The show’s kinetic, nerve-jangling first episode, which was directed by Ridley Scott, follows Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura) as they do what they do best: posing as DEA agents and shaking down low-level drug dealers. It’s a lot of risk for a little payoff, but they rationalize their work as a sort of public good for teaching these dealers they’re not invincible.
Violence in Dope Thief is shocking and brief, from singed corpses to a man being squashed between an alley wall and an oncoming truck. Across its lived-in sets and through its punchy dialogue, the series is alive to all of its characters’ screw-ups, like when Ray yells at Manny for getting the floor of their getaway vehicle wet because he hosed water through the bullet holes.
When Ray and Manny defuse a situation involving a young boy brandishing a firearm, Ray notes that actual feds would have shot the kid—and he’s probably right. Ray in particular is a talker, crediting the practiced authority of his “command voice” with the success of their raids, and Henry is magnetic and funny as the motor-mouthed character. But soon enough, the pair take things too far during a botched job that not even Ray can talk their way out of. They end up pursued not just by the real DEA, but a shadowy drug-running alliance represented by a legion of goons and a colorful Bostonian snarl coming from the other end of a radio.
Past a certain point, though, Dope Thief stops letting its lively details and the colorful performances speak for themselves, delving into backstories and histories that kill its momentum without doing much to deepen the characters as we already understand them. It even loses sight of the shadowy conspiracy at play, which ends up being so uncomplicated that the writers have little choice but to set it aside until the show’s climax.
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