In Dope Thief, which streams on Apple TV+, Bryan Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura are two friends in Philly who “take our cut from the chaos.” Until they’re the cause of a chaos that could straight up kill them. The eight-episode limited series, based on Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel, is created and written by Peter Craig (Top Gun: Maverick, The Town) and includes Ridley Scott as an executive producer and episodic director; Marin Ireland, Amir Arison, Nesta Cooper, Ving Rhames, and Dustin Nguyen also star. So just what are Ray (Henry) and Manny (Moura) up to in the gritty streets of the 215? Follow the sound of Ray’s “Command Voice.”
Opening Shot: February, a few years ago. Philadelphia, PA. It’s a surveillance op, conducted from the back of a beat-up van, with eyes on a drug house. “Yo, what you think he’s holding?”
The Gist: They’ve got badges on chain lanyards, walkie-talkies, pistols and shotguns, and those windbreakers with the big bold initials on the back. “On the ground! Federal agents!” Ray commands, and the cookers and sellers and block watchers obey. Ray and Manny definitely look the part, if you’re looking at them from the perspective of having their badges and guns in your face. But the last thing they are is legit.
Ray and Manny rob criminals. They split the cash two ways, and push whatever product they acquire to Son Pham (Nguyen) to sell back to the street. It’s a decent hustle, and keeps them afloat. Ray’s going to meetings, trying to get sober, and he hopes to financially support Theresa (Kate Mulgrew), the woman who raised him, while Manny has a girlfriend who sees him as a thief with the disposition of a saint. Life goes on, day to day, in a Philadelphia that in the color palette of Dope Thief looks soaked in dirty dishwater.
“Youse are gonna get your heads shot off for two fucking G apiece.” Their ex-convict acquaintance isn’t wrong. As Ray and Manny count their rubber-banded wads of cash, they know that in Philly, word of two sham feds knocking over trap houses will spread fast. So they expand their operation, and take the fake DEA show on the road to a dilapidated farm property 60 miles out of town. But this is its own kind of risk.
From the opening moments of Dope Thief, there is a tension baked into the limited series that anticipates greater trouble. But there are also brief flashbacks, shot in black-and-white, that suggest how trouble has shaped Ray and Manny’s lives. Are they good people? Well, good with a side of Theresa calling them “degenerates” and “shit-bags,” which feel like terms of endearment. But in this latest hustle, the duo’s assurances to themselves that those they rob expect to get pinched also feel like a delay of the inevitable. And when the inevitable arrives, their fake walkie-talkies and alphabet soup windbreakers won’t save them from a reckoning.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dropping at the same time as Dope Thief is Long Bright River, also based on a book and also taking place in Philadelphia. Amanda Seyfried stars. And on the small screen side of their work, Brian Tyree Henry was a huge part of what made Atlanta so electric, while Wagner Moura made a memorable turn in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Our Take: We were immediately pulled in by the weariness that seems to soak Dope Thief like a sleeting rain. Their circumstances are what they are, and what they do to respond is what it is. But for as much as Ray and Manny get a rush from their drug house knockovers, it’s clear that even for them, “taking candy from a baby” is losing its luster. The question for both of them, and one they have not been able to answer for the entirety of their adult lives, is what’s next. And the way Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura play their characters’ friendship, it feels immediately seasoned, as if they’ve been having this argument over life’s frustrations for years, and we’ve only just joined them in the backseat of the van.
Dope Thief also has a great sense of localized language that heightens its lived-in feel, and we’re intrigued with its use of flashbacks, which are somehow both too quick to register and immediately resonant. There is an explosion coming in this series. This is not a spoiler; the sense of it is always there, like the glow from a fire burning around a corner. What we want to see is how Ray and Manny accommodate this, how their lives adjust to the blast wave. Because while they’ve been content to take from the chaos – it’s one way to make this hard world palatable – chaos has a way of taking right back.
Sex and Skin: Nothing really.
Parting Shot: “Nothing in our lives has ever been real…until now.” For Ray and Manny, the realization of the danger their hustle has gotten them into is as heavy as their existential angst over everything that led them to it.
Sleeper Star: Marin Ireland’s appearance in the early going of Dope Thief is brief but weighty. We’re very psyched to see how her character emerges as a foil to Ray and Manny’s hustle.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You’re getting too good at this,” Manny says to Ray. “You almost convinced me we’re real DEA.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. A lassitude permeates the look and feel of Dope Thief that can only be counteracted with violence. Will two friends on the fringes of a criminal life outrun it, and find themselves on the other side of the hustle? Or will the conflict they’ve agitated further define who they always thought they might really be?
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.