Detective Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law) is extremely committed to his job, but it brings him no satisfaction. The long hours he dedicates to crime-busting with the LAPD have alienated his teenage son and infuriated his wife, Candace (Gabrielle Dennis), to the point where Isaiah is sleeping in the summer house. He is permanently vexed. But he isn’t meant to be happy: he’s a maverick cop.
The maverick-copness of its lead character is the first of many crime-show cliches shamelessly replicated by Nemesis, the first Netflix show from writer Courtney A Kemp, creator of the gangster drama Power and its various spin-offs. Isaiah carries the trauma of an old case where a junior colleague was killed in pursuit of a gang of elite thieves: now, whenever a robbery goes down in Los Angeles – and a big one has just happened, with bags of cash brazenly swiped from a posh party’s high-stakes poker game – Isaiah suspects that his white whale, the man who pulled the trigger years ago, is behind it. To the consternation of colleagues, he has a whiteboard in his office covered in photographs and sticky notes.
If that weren’t enough to give him the haunted tetchiness of the classic maverick, Isaiah is also battling to escape the shadow of his father, Amos (Moe Irvin), a convicted gangster whose feckless criminality got Isaiah’s brother killed. Amos is selfish, deluded and a danger to his family – Isaiah is nothing like him! He isn’t!
After a bit of detective work, Isaiah concludes that the poker heist and a subsequent jewellery raid are the work of the crew he has been pursuing all this time – and that they’re led by an esteemed pillar of the Black business community, Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel). A lack of hard evidence means Isaiah risks losing his gun and badge if he insists on Coltrane’s guilt, but he knows he’s right and so do we, since we saw Coltrane masterminding the heists.
Once Isaiah has told Coltrane of his plan to bring him down, Nemesis isn’t just a cop show, it’s a battle of wits between alpha males with similar drives but different moral codes – almost a straight remake of Heat. It’s not averse to ticking off the obvious subplots in a story about a criminal kingpin hiding in plain sight, just out of reach of a lawman who can’t convince anyone else of the guy’s guilt: if you’ve seen similar tales before you might expect the two men’s wives to coincidentally become friends, and indeed, this happens.
What matters, though, isn’t how new the building blocks of your show are. It’s what you construct with them and, having quickly established all of the above in two episodes, Nemesis proceeds to, in plot terms, go berserk. It gets better and better as it goes on, layering on the betrayals, the unexpected alliances, the strained or switched loyalties, the risks taken and stakes raised. (The big boss overseeing Coltrane’s crimes is his sister-in-law! Amos’s criminal career may not be over! There’s a mole in the LAPD!) Worries about the cheesiness of the set-up or the occasional wooden melodrama of some of the acting melt away as the heists become more elaborate, Isaiah gets closer to being fired, and every apparently trivial plot point turns out to be essential.
Law and Noel are strong leads, with Noel suitably smooth and elusive as a man who might be correct in his belief that his misdeeds will never be punished, because he’s just too cool and capable, and Law – familiar as O’Shon the IT guy from Abbott Elementary – cannily spotting the parallels between Isaiah and a manic sitcom protagonist who is right about everything but always seen by others as wrong.
Nemesis is a thriller first and a character study second, though: as a drama about cops and robbers, it’s not exactly The Wire. Except that in the later episodes it sort of is, because esteemed Wire alumni keep turning up. Near the end we have Chris Bauer (Frank Sobotka!) as an irascible senior police officer, Domenick Lombardozzi (Herc!) as a stout New York detective drafted in to help, and Michael Potts (Brother Mouzone!) as Isaiah’s grumpy old-school captain, all in a room together. Potts is particularly delightful as the grizzled boss, forever telling Isaiah off with colourful descriptions of how far up his ass the bosses are. After a spectacular street shootout leaves everyone’s careers in jeopardy, Potts delivers perhaps the best extended “deep shit” metaphor any TV cop ever uttered.
The occasional moments of comedy show that Nemesis knows how absurd it needs to be. And because it judges its own chaos levels perfectly, it’s ridiculously entertaining.