TNT has given the greenlight to the thrilling, action-packed drama series “Leverage,” starring Oscar winner Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People, “Nero Wolfe”) and executive-produced by Dean Devlin (Independence Day, TNT’s “The Librarian”) and John Rogers (“Cosby”).
The series follows a team of thieves, hackers and grifters who act as modern-day Robin Hoods, taking revenge against those who use power and wealth to victimize others. TNT has ordered 13 episodes of “Leverage,” which comes to the network from Devlin’s Electric Entertainment. Devlin makes his directorial debut on the pilot, which was written by Rogers (Transformers) and Chris Downey (“The King of Queens”). “Leverage” is slated to premiere on TNT later this year.
“‘Leverage’ is great entertainment,” said Michael Wright, senior vice president in charge of the content creation group for TNT, TBS and TCM. “It’s fast-paced, smart and just great fun. Dean Devlin directed the pilot to perfection. Timothy Hutton is outstanding, and he and the cast around him have a great chemistry. This is a new genre for us in our series efforts, and it’s great to be able to tackle it with Dean. His ‘Librarian’ movies for TNT have been huge successes. We couldn’t be happier having him and John Rogers bring that same sense of style and storytelling to us in series form.”
In “Leverage,” Hutton plays former insurance investigator Nate Ford, a once-loyal corporate employee who had recovered millions of dollars in stolen goods for his employer. But when that employer denied his son’s insurance claims and allowed the boy to die, he realized he could no longer work for such an entity.
Out of work and descending into alcoholism, Ford is hired by an aeronautics executive to recover airplane designs the executive claims were stolen by a rival company. Helping him are four highly skilled team members: Parker (Beth Riesgraf, Alvin and the Chipmunks), an expert thief; Alex Hardison (Aldis Hodge, “Friday Night Lights”), a specialist in Internet and computer fraud; Eliot Spencer (Christian Kane, “Into the West”), a high-octane “retrieval specialist” who can take out a gang of henchmen without breaking a sweat; and Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman, “Coupling”), a grifter who could win awards for her acting skills during difficult scams. At first the newly formed team is hesitant to trust each other after so many years working alone but being double-crossed changes the dynamic, ultimately forcing them to unite. They emerge from the job realizing they are far better working together than apart. Once they discover they can trust each other the group targets their cons toward the richest, the greediest and the most unjust.
