Dope Thief “Jolly Rancher”/”Bat Out of Hell”
Created by and written by Peter Craig
Directed by Ridley Scott (“Jolly Rancher”) and Jonathan van Tulleken (“Bat Out of Hell”)
Airs Fridays on Apple TV+
When Dope Thief, Apple TV+’s adaptation of Dennis Tafoya’s novel, is firing on all cylinders, there isn’t quite anything like it on television right now. In both of its opening episodes, “Jolly Rancher” and “Bat Out of Hell”, Dope Thief generates incredible moments of tension, able to create a sense of immediate stress matched only by perhaps The Pitt in 2025’s television landscape. It’s just too bad the series can’t be an endless string of shootouts, foot chases, and surprisingly brutal moments of violence and emotion, because whenever it slows down to focus on its assemblage of misfits and their internal dramas, it becomes a much more predictable and less propulsive – though still beautifully shot and expertly performed – crime drama.
Dope Thief begins on quite a high note with the first scene of its Ridley Scott-directed pilot, a kinetic sequence following DEA agents Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura, recast after Michael Mando was fired after an on-set altercation) as they break into a drug house being run by a handful of youths – until they leave, and reveal that they are in fact not DEA agents, but two hard on their luck dudes trying to moralize robbing young drug dealers to pay their bills. Before robbing the low-level drug dealers, the two pontificate on their role in a city overrun with drugs and violence, right before they break into a home with fake badges and walkie talkies; it’s a great opening sequence, introducing us to the well-worn rhythms of two longtime friends, before executing a tense action sequence – and then pulling the rug out from under the audience when it reveals our protagonists are absolutely not trained officers of the law.
“Jolly Rancher” holds onto this twist until the end of the opening scene, and it’s a rather impressive, confident display of character and narrative – which it continues to have throughout the entirety of its first two hours, even when the stories its telling aren’t necessarily the most interesting (or illuminative). Most of the rest of Dope Thief‘s opening two hours are an obvious assemblage of familiar parts; Ray is a former addict trying to help his adopted mother (Kate Mulgrew, chewing scenery in her short appearances in both episodes), and Manny is trying to clean himself up to start a new life with his girlfriend; not inherently empty stories, but ones that immediately put a damp on the kinetic tension of its central narrative, especially when the show tries to weave in sepia-toned flashbacks to moments of traumatic and/or defining moments of each character’s past (a thoroughly unnecessary flair that neither episode, or its leading characters, benefit from in every way).
When its going through Ray’s existential crises and growing anxieties, Dope Thief feels like a million other shows of its ilk, albeit one illuminated by Henry’s always-arresting screen presence, able to capture Ray’s wide range of emotions in a performance that expertly ebbs and flows when its scripts (all penned by Peter Craig) allow it. The mechanisms to draw out these emotions – plots that include biker gangs, mysterious voices snarling over phone calls, and an undercover DEA agent who survives their ambush (Marin Ireland!) – aren’t exactly original, or in some of the opening episode’s flatter moments, even feel necessary, but nonetheless they justify both his casting, and the intense focus the scripts put on his character in the opening pair of episodes.
(side, spoiler note: what a strange decision to have Manny disappear for the last third of “Bat Out of Hell”, suggesting potential drama as to his survival again, not all of Dope Thief‘s attempts at plot land particularly elegantly.)
Where Dope Thief‘s opening two episodes work best is when it puts down its cheesy flashback sequences and nascent attempts at societal reflection (being set in February 2021, there are constant nods to COVID in both the foreground and background) and focuses on the snowball effects of Ray and Manny’s desperate decision to rob a meth house in Pennsylvania (rather than on the internal choices that bring the characters to that moment). Dope Thief stages some incredible tense, creative action sequences, displaying a great sense of space and dramatic momentum with its array of shootouts, car chases, and even the occasional jump scare; in these moments, Dope Thief finds space to explore the dynamics of Ray and Manny, while also delivering kinetic, exciting sequences often punctuated with expectedly brutal bits of streaming-service violence.
Dope Thief also occasionally allows itself pockets of humor in and around these bigger moments; and when it can toe that line between its grimdark narratives and its bits of humor and irony, Dope Thief taps into an energy and dynamic that separates itself a bit from the fairly boilerplate urban crime melodrama it often surrounds those moments with. The burst in tonal contrast is welcome – otherwise, Dope Thief has a bit of a tendency to lean a little too hard into its undersaturated cinematography, and becomes as gray and indistinguishably tonally as it can occasionally be visually.
Not many shows can turn a flattening tire into an satisfying source of tension; Dope Thief does it with confidence, which makes the lengthy scenes where it stumbles through its predictable interpersonal dramas even more of a slog to watch, knowing what the series is clearly capable of in its leanest, most focused form. When a series can deliver such a fun, resonant opening scene like “Jolly Rancher” does (boy, what a scene would that have been was this still a Ridley Scott-directed movie, as originally intended), it makes scenes like Ray yelling at his father (an extremely understated, sparingly deployed Ving Rhames) in prison a little more trivial – and much less engaging, betraying the moments when the show actually allows subtext and tension to drive itself forward.
Though Dope Thief is a perfectly watchable series – and one I’m interested to see carry past its first eight episodes, should Apple TV+ extend it beyond a miniseries – the moments where it sheds the modern conventions of its genre (where every character gets an underwhelming subplot, and internal conflicts develop) show a promise the rest of its first two hours, and its Mad Lib-esque mix of “conflicted people doing crimes in a gritty city”, often feel like they’re suppressing. Should it find more consistency to its voice and delivery (while continuing to lean on the strong dynamic between Ray and Manny, the show’s obvious heartbeat), Dope Thief could certainly realize its pulpy potential, and be more than simply an familiar assemblage of prestige performances and underwhelming subplots.