Breaking even: why we can't get enough of robbing the rich
Most television obeys the law. In crime dramas, which seem to make up the lion’s share of all scripted -television, the cops get their man, the bad guys get banged up, and we can all go to bed knowing the order of things has been restored – crime doesn’t pay, kids.
Except when it does. Heist -dramas are that exception to the rule. From The Great Train Robbery, at the very dawn of cinema, to The Taking of Pelham 123 via The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven to Thirteen (and back to 8) and on to television’s -current obsession with someone getting one over on someone else and stealing literal truckloads of money (see Money Heist, Lupin, Kaleidoscope, Berlin, The Gold), heist drama is the genre that’s above the law.
The latest, Disney+’s Culprits, is a postmodern heist show so steeped in heistiness that it assumes the viewer knows heist-drama lore backwards. Indeed, the series takes place in reverse, beginning by catching up with the various gang members three years after they broke into a secret vault and ran off with someone else’s loot.
From there, Culprits takes all of your favourite heist conceits and upends them. Joe (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) was the muscle in the hit (all of the gang members have code names; his is Muscle) and as such is precisely the kind of figure who usually gets bumped off early in the piece. In Culprits, he’s the main character, now living a happy -family life in America under an assumed identity, but who once took orders from smooth-talking criminal mastermind Dianne (Gemma Arterton). Dianne (code name: Brain), for her part, is another piece of anti-heist drama machinery in that she’s a woman.
“I went through an odyssey of watching heist films when I was preparing for this,” says Arterton. “There are definitely things that as a viewer you kind of hope for: I watched the original Taking of -Pelham 123, which has the original code names – Mr Green, Mr Black, Mr Brown. I mean, watching a whole load of heists, there have been heist leaders who are women … but like, maybe, twice.”
Planning and execution are always vital parts of heist drama, because the viewer knows that man plans and the gods laugh. Yet -Culprits flips that script, too, -showing instead, through a series of flashbacks, that the plan worked. At least until a man in a hockey mask appears a few years later and starts tracking down the team one by one.
It would spoil Culprits to explain why – suffice to say that under--pinning the narrative is a tale of -natural justice and restitution. There is, ulti-mately, a greater evil than the people with guns blasting goons and stealing money. In this, Culprits sits squarely in the heist-drama calculus of rectitude, which says that we will root for people doing bad things if they’re done for a just cause.
Stephen Garrett, Culprits’ -executive producer, is something of a heist specialist, having also worked on the BBC drama Hustle (as well as Spooks and The Night -Manager). -Hustle lionised a gang of con artists pulling off repeated mug jobs.
“You’re dealing with a bunch of crooks, people who are breaking the law,” he says. “And you realise the rule is quite simple, which is just make sure that they’re more charming and likeable than the people from whom they’re stealing. If they’re stealing from people who are worse, then you’re fine. They can actually behave quite badly – and they do – as long as at the end of the rainbow there’s a bigger bad.”
The big bad, the target of the heist, varies across the decades, depending on the bogeyman or looming societal ill of the age. The Great Train Robbery (1903) saw the railroad as a repository of faceless riches; by the 1950s, in Jules -Dassin’s classic Rififi, jewels are seen as something that can be -stolen -without harm – the plaything of -people so rich they wouldn’t really miss them. This in turn led to heist flicks as a critique of -capitalism in general – in Michael Mann’s 1981 Thief, ace safecracker James Caan tells his mark: “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labour.”
Television has taken up the -mantle – this year’s The Gold, set in the real-world 1980s, was a -comm-ent-ary on class structure in Thatcher’s Britain, while Money Heist’s tar-get is the Bank of Spain – a -suggestion that the state itself is diddl-ing the individual, and these have-a-go heroes are simply getting their money back.
What, then, is the biggest bad imaginable in Britain in 2023? “I think the bar has been set quite low with our political classes,” says -Garrett, who cites Donald Trump’s notorious 2016 comment that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. Trump did not shoot anyone, of course, but he did go on to win the election that year. That, says Garrett, is “a very different moral universe – it’s quite hard to be ‘bad’ when you think that most countries are being led by demonstrably bad people. But we have ensured that there is a big, bad wolf at the end of the line.”
In the case of Culprits, that wolf is played by Eddie Izzard, who is a shadowy presence until the closing episodes. Izzard is cagey on his job description – the drama hinges on his character pulling strings from behind the scenes – but he will say that he is a billionaire businessman.
“I based him on the bad -billionaires,” he says. “I suppose there are one or two people with lots of money who are trying to help people, but lots of people seem to get to billionaire status by screwing the people below them and then trying to amass more money so they can die on a bed of gold and go to some sort of golden heaven.”
The steeper the inequality -gradient, the more interest there is in redressing the balance. Robin Hood is the archetype, stealing from the rich in the name of what we now call wealth redistribution, and the recent resurgence of heist dramas on television chimes with an upswell of anger at the so-called 1 per cent. The big bad wolf is now a wealthy elite, blithely untroubled by the cost of living crisis that’s crippling the rest of us.
Culprits’ writer-director, J -Blakeson, sees the irony: “Our guys are literally hiding away when we meet them, existing on the fringes, criminals against the law. But their behaviour isn’t that different from people who are doing it in plain sight, who are legitimate – but it’s called business or taking opportunities or entrepreneurship. A lot of people get away with it for a long time, then get caught and then get a 500 million quid tax bill because they’ve defrauded the government. But they don’t go to prison; they get a slap on the wrist. Whereas other people do low-level crime and go to prison for 15 years. There seems to be an imbalance and injustice.”
Heist dramas such as Culprits exist to indulge the toothsome -fiction that these imbalances can be redressed. Maybe, they say, with just that one last job, things could be made fair again.
Culprits is on Disney+ from Wednesday