Logo text

We need to talk about the existence, or lack thereof, of Michael Mann’s Heat in Courtney A. Kemp and Tani Marole’s new Netflix drama, Nemesis. 

Nemesis is a series with a smart understanding of pop culture, starting in the pilot’s opening seconds, featuring Y’lan Noel’s Coltrane Wilder, the slick leader of a tight gang of master thieves, arriving at a Halloween party in a black Kangol and bulky gold medallion. 

It takes only mid-level awareness to recognize that Coltrane is dressed as Nino Brown from the 1991 classic New Jack City and only a step more awareness to know that Mario Van Peebles, director and star of New Jack City, directed the first two episodes of Nemesis (and collaborated with Kemp on Power and Power Book III: Raising Kanan). 

Other direct references abound throughout the first season of Nemesis, including an efficient criminal facilitator watching Van Peebles’ father’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in the second of his two episodes.

With Heat, maybe not the definitive Los Angeles crime movie but certainly a definitive Los Angeles crime movie, the direct citations are more fleeting, including Clipse’s “Let God Sort ‘Em Out,” which closes the third episode and includes the lyric, “Heat come, I’m De Niro.”

The bigger-picture nods to Heat, however, are everywhere in Nemesis, to the point that if you told me Nemesis had been developed as a straight-up series remake of Heat only to transition from “adapted from” to “inspired by” to “uncredited,” I would believe it. 

Even before the climactic Nemesis action set piece, in which a team of robbers wearing stylized hockey masks engage in a shootout with the cops in the middle of a Los Angeles street in broad daylight — Century City stepping in for Downtown L.A. — the implied links between the two texts are so frequent and so obvious that it would be negligent not to connect them. And it’s perplexing that at no point do either of the series’ dueling adversaries comment on the way similar conflict played out in Heat, treating it as a cautionary tale.

This is not to say that Nemesis is ripping Heat off without attribution.

Kemp, Marole and Nemesis are having a conversation with Heat, looking at what the film does well and where it occasionally suffers or lacks and saying, “What can we do with the shape of this thing that would make it reflect crime, policing and geography in Los Angeles in 2026?” 

So it’s Heat with a pair of Black protagonists, Heat with Baldwin Hills replacing the Hollywood Hills and coastal real estate porn, Heat with the female leads elevated to actual characterizations rather than just cyphers meant to illustrate the monomania of the two leads. 

Of course, it’s also Heat without De Niro and Pacino, and there’s no way for that to not be a major diminution of quality, one of many. 

Still, Nemesis is a soapy serialized thriller that embraces its emotional excesses and occasional detours of narrative ludicrousness. Some of those story choices and character decisions irritated me, and the less than ideal central casting proved a frequent liability, but I never found Nemesis to be anything less than pulpy and entertaining — an overstuffed eight-episode B-movie that concludes with a gaping cliffhanger that absolutely left me ready for the action to continue.

As I said, Noel plays Coltrane — “My name may be Coltrane, but I do not play that improvisational shit when it comes to jobs” — the leader of a gang of high-stakes thieves that includes former sniper Choi (Jonnie Park), Coltrane’s prison buddy Stro (Tre Hale) and mercurial Deon (Quincy Isaiah), who is basically Val Kilmer from Heat as “guy whose gambling problem adds complications.” It’s all facilitated with the help of the mysterious Charlie (Sophina Brown) in the Jon Voight part.

The gang pulls off four carefully planned robberies per year, no more and no less, but Coltrane has been distracted after his wife Ebony’s (Cleopatra Coleman) miscarriage, and the boys are getting impatient. Coltrane, an ex-con who has parlayed his ill-gotten gains into a legitimate real estate operation, is nearly ready to go straight. He eyes one big score and then he’s out.

Little does Coltrane know, but he’s in the crosshairs of Robbery Homicide Division detective Isiah Stiles (Matthew Law), who is convinced that a series of elusive heists are tied to the same gang, a gang that may have killed his former partner. He can’t convince his boss (Michael Potts), who advises him that he’d make captain if he’d just stop chasing this white whale. 

But Stiles is obsessed and, as so often happens with obsessions, it’s taking a toll on his personal life. He’s missing his teenage son’s (Cedric Joe’s Noah) basketball games and his wife Candace (Gabrielle Dennis) has him sleeping in the guest house. We know that Stiles was born on the brink of moral collapse because his estranged father (Moe Irvin) is a former gangbanger so notoriously nightmarish his nickname was “Nightmare.”

An elaborate game of cat-and-mouse ensues, as these two men — one a bad guy trying to be good, the other a good guy willing to go bad — circle each other and occasionally intersect in scenes that are supposed to be the coolest damn thing. Although the show works well when their agendas are moving parallel to each other, the direct showdowns between Coltrane and Stiles are anticlimactic and overwritten — the dialogue is slangy, colorful and alternates between clever and painfully florid — at least until the finale, in which things start getting juicy.

Heat was far from the first story to utilize this structure — New Jack City, our starting point here, was a cat-and-mouse game with Nino Brown and a bunch of cops, which you don’t necessarily remember because Wesley Snipes was an unmatchable charisma bomb in that movie — and Nemesis is far from the most fiercely devoted imitator. This winter’s Crime 101, a surprisingly solid movie, is so Heat-y it makes Nemesis look wholly original. But did I mention that the big action sequence is an urban shootout with the bad guys in hockey masks? There’s no way Coltrane didn’t explain that particular strategy to his boys with, “Let’s do that thing from Heat.”

All credit to Nemesis that, as TV budget versions of Heat go, its set pieces are pretty good (better than L.A. Takedown, the Michael Mann TV pilot that was Heat before Heat). The opening Halloween party robbery, a well-orchestrated second heist, the Los Angeles street shootout and a finale car chase are all above average in their execution, making effective use of L.A. geography and boosting a pace that inevitably has some laggy bits across episodes running nearly 60 minutes apiece. Those laggy bits all relate to the series’ domestic melodrama, particularly on Stiles’ side of the ledger, where questions like “Will Candace have an affair with the hunky deputy district attorney (Jeff Pierre’s Malik)?” and “Will Noah ever stop pouting?” do little to raise the stakes.

Law and Noel, which sounds like a good name for a TNT drama about a firm that does Christmas-based litigation, aren’t bad, but they both come across as too young and too polished and just a little too flat. They’re both impeccably dressed and photographed at every turn, but if you’re looking for contrast, it’s lacking.

With Noel, it works because Coltrane’s public demeanor is supposed to be a counterpoint to the harshness of the criminal world he’s trying to leave. Coltrane is aesthetically refined and emotionally buttoned-down in contrast with the volatile performances from Hale and especially Isaiah. That Brown provides the same level of stylish refinement with significantly more enigmatic menace and that Coleman plays the character-trapped-between-worlds archetype with more complexity doesn’t need to be a bug, and could even be a feature, if you accept that Kemp and Marole are using their hunky male protagonist/antagonist as a Trojan Horse for the more interesting performances that initially present as “supporting.”

Law smolders well, but the character’s arc doesn’t emerge in the way the plot/dialogue keep suggesting it’s supposed to. Stiles’ colleagues and loved ones repeatedly mention that he’s losing control and his behavior is concerning them, but that doesn’t come through in the performance. It becomes harder and harder to understand Dennis’ Candace, because she’s constantly responding to things Law isn’t quite playing. Candace has more of a backbone than token wives in shows like this usually do, though I wish the subplot with Malik was less, well, dumb (and less a version of what Diane Venora’s character does in Heat).

The Stiles/police side of the plot retains engagement because Nemesis has filled the precinct with interesting character actors, including Potts, providing fun shadings to what has been scripted as a juicy variation on the Stern Black Boss stereotype, Domenick Lombardozzi, Mike O’Malley, Stephanie Sigman and Siua Ikale’o. The entire ensemble has been very well-cast, peppered with a slew of The Wire alums and several familiar actors getting to go enjoyably against type, like Mark Feuerstein, who also stretched some in Kemp’s Power Book II: Ghost, as Coltrane’s slick business associate.

Though it feels like the contrivances are already piling up as Nemesis reaches the limbo between its first season and a hypothetical return, Kemp got 63 episodes (and multiple spinoffs of multiple seasons apiece) out of Power, a similarly sudsy and similarly contrived crime melodrama. So maybe there’s room for the Heat to rise.