Andre

The new Thief series on FX has kind of a mid-1950's urban noir feel, shades of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing but with darkly vivid color saturations of green, red, yellow. It's a man's man's world, even more by the end of the pilot than the beginning; blood is spilt.

The cast is generally terrific, and at the center of it all is Andre Braugher, my raison d'etre for tuning in. I cherish him as Detective Frank Pembleton as the brilliant hub of the brilliant Homicide: Life on the Streets, and here he doesn't disappoint, finding material and a production worthy of his talents.

He's playing another arrogant asshole, only this time on the wrong side of the law. Pembleton earned your empathy because at heart he was an avenging angel with a hard-ass conscience. Here he's the brainiac leader of a ring of thieves who do big jobs. He seems to sub-contract out for a wealthy backer (Linda Hamilton, in good form), although their arrangement is still a bit ambiguous. He's got a moral code, a very rigid one, but it's tested as things go south very quickly in the first episode, lots of jackpots coming together at once, starting with a sloppy end to the series opening heist.

That we feel any empathy for a character who does as much bad shit as Nick Atwater is a tribute to Braugher, and I think he's bravely trying to take it to a place where our bond is sorely tested, challenging himself in a way he hasn't been since H:LOTS.

The plotting is kind of male melodramatic but the treatment is distanced, a little too MTV for my taste, maybe just signature for director Paul McGuigan, who did Wicker Park and has Lucky Number Sleven coming out. David Manson and Norman Morrill are listed as writers/producers with Morrill as creator, so who knows how much of it is their own stamp or what a different director might reveal.

The best thing they do with the story, I think already by the 45-minute mark, is to have Braugher respond to his cash-poor crew that he's got an notion about another job. The idea forming. Already something to look forward to.

I'm wondering if we're feeling enough honor among these thieves that it'll really hit us if they start tearing at each other. I don't know how well-researched the show is or if it's just a fanciful conceit of middle-class thieves. Do rings like these really exist? Do they really ever hug?

In any case we don't know so much about the codes, the bonds, how they work. The guys don't seem to be in any way Mafia, they're not the Mod Squad.

What brought these thieves together, how long have they been making it click, how often?

And do the showrunners plan on filling us in?