Hutton, Chicago setting intriguing in 'Leverage'

The caper genre seems such a natural for a TV series - it's typically dramatic, tense, fast-paced and visually engaging - but only one has ever been successful over any length of time: "Mission: Impossible." Still, that doesn't stop people from trying it anew, and now TNT is taking a stab at it, with the help of leading man Timothy Hutton.

"Leverage" debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday on TNT, with Hutton starring as the reluctant head of a ring of highly specialized thieves. The twist is that, through one thing and another, these thieves establish themselves not as mercenaries, but as a band of Merry Men and Women led by Hutton's Nathan Ford as their anti-corporate Robin Hood.

It's an attempt to give the caper genre a little heart to go with its ruthless sense of style. I'm not sure if that's going to be enough to make "Leverage" appointment viewing when it moves into its normal time slot at 9 p.m. Tuesday, but it's interesting enough as it is to be worth a try, especially as it's set in Chicago without making a huge deal out of it.

Nate is a former insurance investigator, which wouldn't seem to make him a candidate to organize an ornery bunch of determinedly independent freelance thieves, but that's exactly what familiar character actor Saul Rubinek recruits him to do. The hook is that Nate gave his life for the insurance company, only to have the company turn its back on health care for his son, who subsequently died. He's a broken, bitter man, with an ax to grind against corporate interests, but he insists with a Nixonian persistence, "I'm not a thief."

That would seem to set him apart from Aldis Hodge's computer hacker Hardison, Christian Kane's muscle-bound enforcer Eliot and Beth Riesgraf's nimble, acrobatic Parker, who truly sets herself apart as "20 pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag," especially given her explosive, fratricidal back story, but combined with his organizational skills it also gives Nate the authority to herd this band of wildcats. "I know you children don't play well with others," he says in the middle of their first heist, "but I need you to hold it together for seven more minutes."

As ever, intricate timing and precision are keys to the caper drama, but of course so is the inevitable double-cross. For the others it's simply business, but Nate takes it personally, and recruits another specialist, Gina Bellman's polyglot femme-fatale grifter Sophie Devereaux, to execute a little exercise in payback.

Yet that's just the thing about the caper drama: For all its twists and turns, a viewer knows pretty much where it's going to end up, with the good guys - or, in this case, the antihero good guys - on top, and the genuine bad guys on the bottom. Maybe that's why it's been so hard for the genre to sustain interest. (See Ray Liotta's short-lived "Smith" or Andre Braugher's FX miniseries "Thief.") In any case, it comes as no surprise whatsoever, after Eliot states this was "one show only, no encores," when the five suddenly reunite and commit themselves to Nate's mission to root out corporate inhumanity wherever they can find it. After all, this isn't a made-for-TV movie; it's a series.

This in itself is an intriguing spin on the caper drama. After all, while "Mission: Impossible" might have been shady, working in the shadows of government, it was basically a good and decent government, not the autoimmune system-at-war-with-itself of "24." And the good intentions also set the show apart from more criminal elements like the aforementioned "Thief" or caper films like "The Killing" and "The Asphalt Jungle" (not to mention the tres-existentiale French "Rififi" and "Bob le Flambeur").

If Hutton can tap into his appealing boyish-looks-gone-haggard world-weariness, while blowing a little hot air on Nate's simmering sexual tension with Sophie (the two have a history, it would seem), there might be enough unique character in this series to get past the plot predictability. It would also help if they kept shooting on location in Chicago. The city looks great, on the riverfront and in Millennium Park, and if the characters wind up for a time in Cook County Hospital and not Stroger Hospital, which long ago replaced it, hey, I for one am not going to grudge the show a little license. Just watch the product placement, please. Excesses in that regard would undercut the anti-corporate subtext in a way not so easily forgiven.