It’s been nearly three years since our favorite criminals pulled their last con on some baddies, giving underdogs and the downtrodden a chance. So with Prime Video’s Leverage: Redemption returning on April 17 for Season 3, it only seemed sensible to case the situation before the awesomeness unfolds.
Keep in mind that Leverage: Redemption is a true sequel series to TNT’s Leverage series that premiered in 2008 and ran for five seasons. Leverage: Redemption premiered on Freevee in 2021, reuniting four of the original five team members and adding two new ones.
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DISCLAIMER: The following contains spoilers for how Leverage (2008) concluded and where Leverage: Redemption Season 2 ended. If you aren’t caught up, you may want to stop here.
Leverage: Redemption
The original Leverage was an uncredited remake of the British series Hustle. (Seriously, fight me on that one. I dare you.) And in a nutshell, the premise is basically Ocean’s Eleven meets The A-Team. Instead of ex-military mercenaries with skills, the team is comprised of a select group of criminal specialists. As in, they’re criminals with specialized skills.
Leverage: Redemption happens in real-time relative to the ending of the original series. Ten years have passed. The team has kept in touch, but they’ve been busy. While the team leaders, Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman) and Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton), pseudo-retired to a life of domesticity, the others have franchised the Leverage brand into Leverage International, training teams all over the world to fight the good fight, righting wrongs, and stealing from the rich to level the playing field. And finance their operations, of course.
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The genius of Leverage: Redemption is how cognizant they are of the formula they work within. They anticipate the ritual lines, poke fun at expectations, and commentate when something novel occurs. The joy of the series is that they always save the day, and as unrealistic and bonkers their endeavors are, it works out, and that’s okay. Nay, it’s why we tune in.
The O.G. Team
Sophie Devereux – The Grifter
At the end of Leverage, Sophie and Nate depart for parts unknown after he proposes marriage. Leverage: Redemption begins a year after Nate’s death, with the team descending upon Sophie to rope her into “one last heist” to get her juices flowing again. Since Nate was “The Mastermind,” putting the cons together, Sophie reluctantly steps into the role but still maintains her place as “The Grifter,” putting her theatrical training and confidence skills to work to manipulate their marks.
Over Seasons 1 and 2 of Leverage: Redemption, much of Sophie’s life pre-Nate and pre-Leverage came to light, including her former partners in crime Arthur Wilde (Damian O’Hare), Billy the Gent (Max Baker), and Ramsey (Ralph Brown). In the two-part finale arc — “The Museum Makeover Job” and “The Crowning Achievement Job” — we even meet her estranged step-daughter, Astrid Pickford (Alexandra Park), now a top Interpol agent, determined to take down Ramsey, whom she blames for her father’s downfall and death. (She and Parker also have a nemesis thing going on.)
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Sophie’s path forward appears to be team-centered. She’s been offered theaters to run, has enough money to retire comfortably, and could really step into any position she felt drawn to, but still, she remains with the team. Hopefully, in Season 3, she continues to find the cons as challenging and satisfying, and the “Will She? Won’t She?” question is laid to rest.
Parker – The Thief
Over the arc of the original series, Parker (Beth Riesgraf) grew from a traumatized savant with trust issues to a confident mastermind in her own right. As he bade the con life adieu, Nate left the team to Parker, believing her best suited to coordinating future ops. Little did he know that ten years later, she’d be training, administering, and mentoring a dozen Leverage International squads.
As Eliot (Christian Kane) once described her, Parker’s “20 pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag.” Perhaps not the most sensitive way to describe her neurodiversity, but it’s pretty apropos, considering her quirks. Whether it’s licking dinosaur skulls, smelling safes, or mitigating her urge to stab people by always having a taser on her, Parker manages not to burn the world down as a courtesy to the rest of us, not because she really wants to. Finding her family in the Leverage team empowered her with the belief that enough good people doing the right thing can make a difference.
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And let’s not forget that she’s the best thief in the world. There isn’t a safe she can’t crack, a security system she can’t fool, a contortionist feat she can’t conquer. She’s as happy climbing through vents as she is diving off buildings. With Hardison (Aldis Hodge) at her side and someone bad she can light on fire (figuratively or literally), life is a never-ending delight for our Parker.
Eliot Spencer – The Hitter
Eliot’s the strong-but-silent-ish type with little patience for the cerebral hobbies and recreational role-playing the other members spend their time, money, and energy on. He’s the muscle, but he finds his greatest strength in his relationships with the team. In the original series, his skills from time with military black ops teams and as a retrieval specialist get them out of tight jams.
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When the team runs into people from Sophie’s past in Season 2, Eliot’s role as protector extends to learning what Billy the Gent truly wants to get out of reconnecting with her. Later, he tells her that she believed her old partners deserved second chances because a second chance redeemed her. He shares that he knows he’ll never be truly redeemed for what he’s done, but he’s glad to be part of the team where he can help out a bit.
Eliot’s early life is vague at best. We learn in Leverage: Redemption Season 2 Episode 6, “The Fractured Job,” that he was adopted by a hospital worker and her husband when his birth parents dropped him off at the hospital. He returns to Oklahoma to talk to his father, Billy (Keith David), after a long period of estrangement. Part of Eliot’s contribution to the Leverage International organization is a string of food trucks called Brick & Basil, which he owns and operates globally. He uses them to provide ex-military soldiers with jobs while providing cover and hidden tech support for ops. But mostly, he just likes to cook. It’s his geekdom. But don’t tell him that.
Alec Hardison – The Hacker
Aldis Hodge’s star was on the rise when Leverage: Redemption began production. Between roles in the 2020 film One Night in Miami, Showtime’s City on a Hill, and 2022’s Black Adam, it’s not surprising that the team’s tech bro, Alec Hardison, was only an occasional on-site team member in Seasons 1 and 2. He appeared in three of 16 Season 1 episodes and five of 13 in Season 2, including Season 2 Episode 4, “The Date Night Job,” which is probably my favorite episode out of all of the episodes in both series.
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Growing up in the foster system, Hardison picked up skills wherever he landed. Once Nana brought him into her foster home and he discovered the Internet, the world fundamentally changed. He quickly gained a reputation as one of the world’s best hackers. Nana (never seen on screen — yet) notes that she got used to the FBI showing up at her door once Hardison was doing his thing.
A geek to the core, Hardison’s youthful humor and irreverence got the team into some tight spots in the original series. However, he soon incorporated his understanding of game theory and technology into the team’s ops, eventually running his own con in Season 4 on “The Gold Job.” By the time Leverage: Redemption kicks off, he’s helped set up and equip the Leverage International teams while working globally with refugee groups. Although he’s needed elsewhere, both in IRL and as a plot device, he manages to stay connected through Parker and Breanna. Being Hardison, he sends them a case or two and shows up for the Season 1 finale to help take down the season’s Big Bad, R.I.Z. But, of course, by the end of Season 2, he’s in space. Because… Hardison.
The Newbies
Breanna Casey – The Maker
Stepping into Hardison’s significant absence, his foster sister Breanna Casey (Aleyse Shannon) brings a new form of tech know-how to the team. Stalking them to New Orleans while coincidentally being on the run from the FBI (a familial trait), Breanna pitches the team on how her mechanical engineering and social media savvy can be useful.
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Growing up with stories of Hardison’s Robin Hood-esque antics, Breanna is the team member most committed to being a force for change. She’s not one to choose the lesser of two evils; she’ll burn them both down. Being the youngest and arguably least experienced, she’s plagued by insecurities about measuring up. Of all the team members, she has the least to seek redemption for. Her presence and perspective upgrade the team’s overall relevance in the scope of modern issues.
It’s a lot of fun watching her build her toolbox of skills. In two seasons, she’s grown from Baby Grifter and Baby Thief level to Toddler, at least. Whether she’ll ever tap into Hitter and Fixer fields remains to be seen.
Harry Wilson – The Fixer
It needs confirmation, but Noah Wyle’s involvement in Leverage: Redemption feels like he and Christian Kane couldn’t let their The Librarians partnership end when the show took its curtain call in 2018. Kane bounced from Leverage‘s finale in 2012 to The Librarians’ launch in 2014, right back to Leverage: Redemption in 2020. Only he returned to the role of Eliot Spencer with Harry Wilson, reformed sleazy lawyer to Bad Guys, in tow.
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Harry’s unique in this crowd. He’s the only one who spent most of his life living within the rule of law. That doesn’t make him a Good Guy, though. In fact, it’s when he realized that using the letter of that law to help corrupt clients do harm made him just as much a Bad Guy that he turned over a new leaf by joining the team. For someone who more often than not gets recognized and identified as himself, he does some pretty cool stuff with the team in the first two seasons.
When he tries to go fully legit Good Guy in the Season 2 finale by joining a law firm specializing in human rights cases, Parker squashes that dream in typical Parker fashion. She points out (as she did in the Season 1 finale) that, like it or not, he’s a Good-Bad Guy now. Just like the rest of them.
Leverage: Redemption Season 3 – What Will It Look Like?
It causes me some concern that Noah Wyle is only credited with two of the ten episodes in the upcoming Season 3. With his new hit show, The Pitt, on USA Network making serious network waves, it may be that this is the season he pulls an Aldis Hodge. The production’s clearly made accommodations before. Maybe he’ll go to space, too. Hodge is also locked into a second season of Cross on Prime Video, so the Hardison content of Season 3 could also be more seasoning than main.
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Prime Video’s blurb for Leverage: Redemption Season 3: “This season, the team pits themselves against a power broker stealing clean water, fight against a Mayor who’s both judge and jury of his small town, outrun a mark who’s finally caught up with them mid-con, outhustle a pool hustler with a side business in international extortion, and bring down an industrialist exploiting child labor.” Sounds like good Thursday night viewing, doesn’t it?
What can we expect? Outrageous accents. Ridiculous cover stories. Fabulous schemes. Perfect pacing with elegant flashback reveals. A peek into a world where the punishment invariably fits the crime. A world where Justice prevails with a witty mic drop and a villain screaming their rage. Parker tazing someone. It’s a formula, yes, but it’s one that works. You don’t mess with a good thing.
Leverage: Redemption Season 3 premieres on Prime Video on April 17.
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