The first thing you need to know about “Nemesis,” the latest from “Power” creator Courtney A. Kemp and her partner Tani Marole, is that it is deeply silly. It features lines like a diamond thief saying to his boss, “Call me Sydney Sweeney, because these bitches are all-natural,” or the lead thief telling his crew, “My name may be Coltrane, but I do not play that improvisational shit when it comes to jobs.”
The second thing you need to know is that “Nemesis” is deeply—deeply—indebted to Michael Mann’s 1995 crime thriller “Heat.” That’s nothing new for crime stories, mind; “Crime 101” was practically a copy-and-paste, and that came out just a few months ago. But the spin here is that Kemp and Marole asked themselves, “What if we told another LA-set game of cat-and-mouse between a workaholic cop and an equally dogged criminal mastermind, but the protagonists were Black? And what if we told that story over eight melodramatic hours?”
That over-the-top-ness is central to “Nemesis”‘s DNA, and it’s liable to entertain and frustrate in equal measure. The beats and conventions of this kind of cops-and-robbers story are followed to a T, right down to both men losing themselves in the obsessions of their jobs. The cop in question is Detective Isaiah Stiles (“Abbott Elementary”‘s Matthew Law), your classic loose cannon who breaks the rules but gets the job done; he’s haunted, of course, by past failures, including guilt over the death of a trainee years ago at the hands of a gang of masked robbers he was pursuing. He’s convinced that the group is still operating, and is the same one that just pulled a big job at a high-stakes poker game.
Thing is, he’s right; the mastermind behind that heist is Coltrane Wilder (“The First Purge” lead Y’Lan Noel), a pillar of the community who moonlights as a master thief with a four-man crew. Between still grieving his wife Ebony’s (Cleopatra Coleman) miscarriage, and one of his cohorts, Deon (Quincy Isaiah), constantly slipping up and getting in over his head (think Kilmer in, well, “Heat”), ‘Trane is looking for a way out. That means pulling a few “last big jobs,” and fast. That leaves less time for Stiles to sniff him out, especially since he clocks early on that ‘Trane is behind it all. He just doesn’t have the evidence, and a cohort of police superiors (half of whom—Domenick Lombardozzi, Michael Potts, Chris Bauer—are “The Wire” alumni) warn him ad nauseam about the consequences of his obsession to his career and the force.
For the most part, “Nemesis” plays all of these conventions out in derivative fashion, with a slightly soapier twist given the show’s bona fides (“Power” was similarly silly, though the dialogue is especially tin-eared here; “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but cash is for grown-ass women,” after all). Frustratingly, its shaggiest episodes also happen to be the ones directed by Mario Van Peebles, who has to fight through all the table-setting that must occur before the really wacky stuff can ensue. There are some fun flourishes in his hours: Coltrane struts into the poker game dressed almost exactly like Nino Brown in “New Jack City” (which Van Peebles also directed and starred in), and a later jewelry heist kicks off with the gang dressed in diamond-studded masks, which is cool. But the real fun stuff builds off the thankless work that Van Peebles’ episodes have to do.
As the series progresses, it gets easier to lean into its lunacy, especially as our heroes on both sides of the law have their personal lives increasingly intertwined with their business. Most refreshing is the way their wives get to play into the action, albeit in contrived ways; of course Ebony will wind up becoming close friends with Stiles’ wife, Candace (“A Black Lady Sketch Show”‘s Gabrielle Dennis), and slowly start to warp their friendship to get her husband off Coltrane’s trail. The twists and turns don’t end there: Of course Stiles’ estranged father, Amos (Moe Irvin), is a legendary LA gangbanger so bloodthirsty that his nickname is “Nightmare.” Of course Coltrane’s fixer for his heists is his girlboss sister-in-law, Charlie (Sophina Brown), who walks around in glamorous outfits with shoulder pads so sharp pigeons couldn’t land on them. The more mustard the creators put on this particular hot dog, the more you just have to embrace the taste.
It’s not all corniness, though, as the later episodes really show off the Century City-set location shooting with some admirably staged setpieces. Law and Noel may not get much opportunity to differentiate themselves from one another (Law, in particular, gets lost in the sauce with his devil-may-care cop, to the point where you don’t necessarily root for him), but they acquit themselves well with a gun. And don’t worry, we get the prerequisite machine-gun fight down a crowded highway with criminals in hockey masks, in case you forgot how indebted to “Heat” this thing is.
To enjoy “Nemesis” requires a hefty tolerance for cheese, and a yearning for the kinds of gritty, but elegant Black crime dramas we used to get in the 1990s: “Set It Off,” “New Jack City,” “Belly.” It would be folly to say that this measures up to those; much as I appreciate the extra room for this larger ensemble to grow, the hour-long runtimes mean that scenes and pacing drag out a bit too much, especially in the middle stretch. But when it pops off, it’s entertaining, and your patience will ultimately be rewarded. It’s closer to “Den of Thieves” than “Heat” for sheer ridiculousness, but if you’re tired of rewatching those, it’ll do in a pinch.
Full season screened for review. Currently streaming on Netflix.
