The first season of THE BAD GUYS: The Series, showed them climbing to the top of the city’s Worst of the Worst List. The second season switches from caper stories to character: Snake discovering his mother is remarrying, Wolf meeting his old mentor DB Cougar (doesn’t go well), the world’s first-ever criminal thawing out of suspended animation, plus new encounters with rival gangs (the Gruff Goats, the Night Owls).
Finally they get back to crimeing, launch the greatest winning streak since the legendary Crimson Paw (who plays a large role in the Bad Guys movie). Enter Tara Ripper, a vigilante who’s determined to take down the city’s #1 crimesters, and might be smart enough to do it. The series builds up enough added characters I’m surprised it ends here, but the meteor shower at the finish clearly leads into the movie. “I always thought goats fainting were a myth, like white pizza or chiropractors.”
The 2008-2012 series Leverage took a team of crooks headed by the world’s best insurance investigator (Timothy Hutton) to take on the kind of rich, powerful people who take what they want — against them, the team provides leverage. Which is not a new concept (“criminals the law can’t touch” have been the antagonists in multiple TV series and pilots) but here it worked. In 2021, the team returned, absent Hutton but adding Noah Wylie, for LEVERAGE: Redemption, which wrapped up its third and final season last year.
The premise is that in the years since the first series, the team — led primarily by master thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf) — have expanded into an international operation (they have the money). The second season stories focus again on corporate wrongdoing that ruins the lives of regular people, from peddling bogus woo as miracle cures to greenwashing. Plus oddball cases such as a writer presenting himself as the mastermind of the team in a new book — what’s up with that? And what happens when someone kidnaps the guy to make use of his (non-existent) skills? It’s a fun season that lives up to the original show. “Squirrels and other indigenous wildlife chewing through wires have caused 1,300 blackouts in the United States in the past five years.”
After I finished By the Bomb’s Early Light (details tomorrow) I rewatched 1982’s THE ATOMIC CAFE, an antinuclear film assembled out of sections of 1940s and 1950s pro-nuclear and Cold War films. Bikini Islanders smiling happily as their friend Uncle Sam relocates them before the atomic test. Someone explaining how shopping malls mark the difference between Americanism and Communism (“With plenty of free parking for all the cars we capitalists seem to acquire.”). County and Western songs about the bomb (there were a few) playing in the background. Cartoon character Burt the Turtle showing kids the infamous “duck and cover” drills — I’d forgotten that if they don’t have a desk to hide under, simply curling up in a ball on the ground was supposedly the solution. And assuring soldiers radiation is no threat — if you were close enough to get radiation poisoning, the blast would have killed you anyway (if you want more on the government’s myth-making about radiation, I recommend the horrific The Plutonium Files). The documentary does a good job situating all this in the framework of the Cold War, however cynical (justifiably) it is about some of the snake oil the government peddled in that era. “I am not an ‘atomic playboy’ as one of my critics labeled me.”
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