LEVERAGE SEASON 4:
When the rich and powerful use their money and power to get what they want at the suffering of others Nate Ford (played by Timohty Hutton) and his team will stop at nothing to stop the  rich and powerful. This team that consists of Sophie the grifter (played by Gina Bellman), Alec the hacker (played by Aldis Hodges), Eliot the hitter (played by Christian Kane), and Parker the thief (played by Beth Riesgraf) are the muscle behind Nate’s brains that allow their cons to be pulled off. Though the members on this team might fall in the darker areas of the gray parts of the law, they work together so that the weak are not harmed by the strong.

LETS CON US SOME RICH FOLK:
Every episode of Leverage had me asking one question, how do people find this group? Here’s the plot, a group of people who break the law themselves using their own skill set to accomplish the current con so they can help their clients from becoming victims to the rich and powerful. To accomplish the cons they team does, they will investigate the person, persons, or company that is trying to do someone else wrong, then they take that knowledge to create an elaborate con to bring them to justice. The question I brought up of how do people find out about this group comes up because the team is supposed to be this secretive group that no one knows about yet someone people who are in trouble not only know about them but they find them with no trouble.

Now this question might not bother some people but for me it was the beginning of me being annoyed with the show. Here’s my problem with it. If this group is supposed to be as good as they are shown to be, then a potato farmer is not going to find them like she was searching for the closest library. But lets go with the idea that past clients refer the new clients to them. Ok, I can see that working, but if this group has done as much to the rich and powerful as they seem to be doing, then by this point any company that was thinking of doing something illegal would already know about the group and would go after them first to stop them from stopping them.

Leverage does have a interesting plot, aside from everyone seeming to know about them, this show is like Ocean’s Eleven on a recurring basis but with a smaller group. It has a good cast of actors who do really well in their rolls as a thief, a grifter, muscle, hacker, and brains with all of them having some good chemistry with each other. I might not know of people that actually do this sort of thing but the actors make their characters believable enough that they seem like they really could do the things they do. The episodes are edited together to give a quick progression from learning the problem, getting a solution, and then fixing the problem. I even liked the titles of the show with always having them end with “job”. The only aspect that I didn’t like about the show, which is a big one, is that the shows are all the same. Sure they have a different problem to solve but it always seems to be the same. Each episode is set up where they meet someone that is being threatened by someone with power and money. Nate the leader works out a con to pull, Parker and Alec flirt with each other, Sophie and Nate flirt with each other, Eliot beats up someone, Alec complains about someone technical, Nate drinks, and then they pull off the con and the show ends. Watching Leverage once in a while would be fine, I would actually enjoy it quite a bit, but watching the whole season with episode back to back ended up just showing how much the frame work of the show is always the same. Overall, Leverage season 4 is entertaining, has a good cast, it’s edited well, and has a surprising gem of an episode in “The Van Gogh Job”, but with the repetitive outline in the episodes the show loses some of it’s interest half way through the season.