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News Leverage Revival ordered at IMDBtv

I'd love to see more Leverage, as long as the writers/producers come back, but I've never been fond of Noah Wyle. He was my least favorite part of the Librarians TV series from the same producers (which was a hundred times better than the three dreadful Librarian movies Wyle starred in for TNT -- well, two dreadful ones and one moderately watchable one, but he was annoying in all three). I'm also disappointed that Hardison is only going to be recurring, and only as much as his schedule with his other show permits.
 
As I said in the other topic...

Yes!!! Such a great underrated show!!!

But Noah Wylie is literally the last person I would ever want on the show. He is beyond boring. A wooden cut out of him would be a better actor than he is.
 
Leverage was one of my favorites, so I'm excited that we're gonna be getting more of it, especially with (most of) the original cast returning. I can take or leave Noah Wyle, I just hope he doesn't overwhelm the OG crew. I am disappointed that Aldis Hodge will only be recurring; Hardison was by far my favorite character in the original show.
 
Just finished the first 8 episodes and it was fun to have the old gang mostly back together. It wasn't quite the same as Hardison the hacker was only in the first two episodes, only to become an off-screen presence whose place on the team is taken by his younger sister.

Noah Wyle's character is just sort of there and didn't really make any real impression other than being the new guy on the team.

The second half of the season drops before the end of the year. In the meantime, the revival has inspired me to go back in watch some episodes of the original series, which I haven't revisited since it left the air. I had actually totally forgotten that Jeri Ryan had appeared in a stretch of episodes.
 
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I enjoyed the show. It recaptures the chemistry fairly well, though the humor is sometimes a bit goofier than I remember the original being. I miss Hardison, but his sister's a pretty cool character too, and I like it that the team is now majority-female. And it's the first time I haven't been underwhelmed by a Noah Wyle performance, like they've finally found the right character type for him. I never found him compelling in his more dramatic roles, and I found him annoying broad in his more comic role as Flynn in the Librarian franchise. This role strikes a happy medium between those two.

But I am disappointed by one thing. After they set up the idea of the Leverage International operation at the end of the original series, I was hoping a followup would explore that status quo. Instead, they just made the occasional brief allusion to it and otherwise reverted to the original small-team dynamic. There was one episode where they had a couple of anonymous helpers playing supporting roles, like the repertory companies that sometimes helped out in the Mission: Impossible TV series, and they were implicitly Leverage Intrnational team members, but that glimpse was about all we got of the larger operation. It seems odd that they theoretically have such a large organization now, but the core group has reverted to operating alone on a small scale. I don't think the show has adequately explained why that is, in-story. It's just arbitrarily reverting to the old formula.
 
The new episodes are up now, and I watched the LeVar Burton one. Pretty fun, though the big twist became obvious well before these supposedly savvy con artists figured it out.

They threw in a bit of an in-joke to the previous series from these creators -- when someone was expressing skepticism of the idea of a librarian being a hero, the camera held on Noah Wyle. And they couldn't resist a TNG nod with Burton. If they were willing to be that obvious, I'm surprised that at the beginning, when he was recommending a book to the girl in the library, he didn't say "But you don't have to take my word for it."
 
I may have watched an episode or two of the original Leverage but don't really remember them. Has the show always been this... for a lack of a better term, family-friendly? Even the dangerous professional assassin was barely PG-rated.
 
I may have watched an episode or two of the original Leverage but don't really remember them. Has the show always been this... for a lack of a better term, family-friendly? Even the dangerous professional assassin was barely PG-rated.

Well, Leverage was on TNT, a commercial cable network, not something like HBO. It literally was rated TV-PG. And it was always a fairly light, fun caper show about quirky characters and their comic banter. Though it had a pretty potent dramatic side on occasion, since the whole operation was driven by Nate Ford's pain, guilt, and fury at the death of his child due to the callousness of the insurance company he'd worked for, and his struggle with alcoholism was an ongoing thread.

I think the revival is a little bit more whimsical in tone, and the remaining characters don't have quite as much pain and darkness driving them as Nate did, but overall it's basically the same. I think it's a show that should be accessible to a wide audience, because it's trying to enlighten the audience about the ways the rich and powerful screw us over -- like how the second new episode, "The Unwellness Job," works in a lecture about how corporations game search engines to steer people toward desired sites and thereby promote the spread of misinformation. It's a pretty educational show in its way, so being family-friendly is a plus.
 
Okay, I'm 5 episodes into the back half of the season now, and they've done three episodes in a row where the team just happens to stumble on a crisis, the latter two of which both have just part of the team having to improvise a con on the fly. That's a bit repetitive. And I always find that kind of storytelling contrived, when characters who specialize in doing a certain thing just happen to run into a situation that would benefit from their exact skills, rather than getting involved in it through the regular channels.

It was particularly contrived in the first case, "The Jackal Job," because that involved coming to the aid of a legendary grifter. It would've been simple enough to have her be aware of the Leverage team and seek out their help, without the implausibility of Sophie and Brianna just coincidentally coming across her.

It was also a bit problematical in the case of "The Golf Job," where Harry and Eliot just happened to stumble onto a guy who was exploiting illegal immigrants and they decided to help them while the immigrants were too afraid and beaten down to seek help or have any agency in freeing themselves. It came off as rather white-saviorish.

Still an entertaining show, but there are things it could do better.
 
Ooh, I guess I'll finally have to get around to subscribing to Prime.

Rogers coming back as showrunner is heartening. The new show has been entertaining but not quite up to the level of the original. Sometimes it gets a little too goofy, particularly in season 2.
 
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