First ‘Heist,’ then ‘Thief’ -- it’s a TV crime spree

Two new series that ask us to look kindly upon crooks come to television within a week of one another. “Heist” (no relation to the David Mamet film of the same name) is first, tonight at 10 on NBC; “Thief” (no relation to the Michael Mann film of the same name) follows Tuesday on FX. They have much in common -- each boasts a season-long story arc leading to a really big job, each proposes a team of specialists who are ridiculously good at not only their specialties but also whatever other jobs the script needs them to do and who pride themselves upon harming only faceless institutions -- but at heart they are very different shows.

Directed by Doug Liman (who made “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” which the network advertises like it’s a good thing) and written by Mark and Robb Cullen (FX’s “Lucky”), “Heist” requires a thorough suspension of disbelief. Like the remade “Ocean’s Eleven” -- one of the many films it amalgamates and whose multi-casino robbery here becomes a raid on three Rodeo Drive jewelry stores -- it proposes capers of an inelegant complexity that leave no room for error and whose success depends on an absurdly exact, almost psychic reading of human nature.

Although we are meant to regard its dishonest protagonists as the epitome of contemporary cool, they come off as self-satisfied and pretentious. The lead crook (Dougray Scott, from “Dark Water,” “Ever After” and “Enigma”) blames his life of crime on his “inability to believe in systems.”

“Once I saw how things worked,” he says, “or didn’t work -- the absurdity of it all -- I guess I’m talking about consciousness here -- robbing faceless hegemonic corporations seemed in a strange way the right thing to do.” To which partner Steve Harris, from “The Practice,” responds, “Have you ever tried a nonauthoritarian collective like a kibbutz?” I can hear Woody Allen speaking this stuff to great effect (and Tony Roberts answering), but here it reads as mere ostentation.

The show suffers as well from another syndrome of modern screenwriting, that of having characters spout irrelevant trivia to demonstrate their “reality.” Before you can say “Stop in the name of the law,” we learn how Sid Vicious, Otis Redding, Tim Buckley and Karen Carpenter died, that Attila was beaten by Aetius at the Battle of Chalons in 451 and that “Mother Teresa didn’t believe in God.” (“She definitely questioned His existence in some of her letters,” says Harris, mid-robbery. “Listen, after she heard Jesus’ voice on the train from Darjeeling ...” counters Scott.)

For the work they’ve done in the past, I’m glad that Harris and Seymour Cassel (as the old guy among them) are getting the paycheck. Rounding out the gang are Marika Dominczyk, who is hot and serious, and David Walton, who is goofy and has most of the good lines and doesn’t waste them. On the near side of the law are Michelle Hicks as a sexy police detective, with a dark and a soft side (she shoplifts, salsa dances), and Reno Wilson and Billy Gardell as the standard pair of mismatched, mutually antagonistic detectives. Soap opera complications loom for some of the above.

The show has a nice feel for the local urban scenery, well photographed by Janie Barber, and could easily be a big hit.

To my taste and thinking, “Thief” is the far superior series, even though it also strains credulity at times and drops the odd pop-cult reference (John Coltrane, “Dog Day Afternoon,” but at least in context). Once again, its hero-crooks are seen to be superior to other crooks both in their choice of targets -- banks and insurance companies -- and in their methods. “Done right, money all around, nobody gets hurt, it’s win-win,” says the boss (Andre Braugher) of his gang’s business plan. But when he observes, “Everybody steals -- biggest thieves in the country got their own Fortune 500 companies -- no such thing as a straight life,” it plays as the shaky self-justification it is. Where in “Heist” crime becomes a glamorous lark, the thieves of “Thief” are workmen first.

Its touch is lighter -- “Heist” is applied with a sledgehammer -- yet its concerns run deeper. Indeed, though the pilot opens in the middle of a bank job, it has less to do with stealing things than with the pressures that are driving the characters apart and their struggle to keep themselves together. Nearly everyone here is under stress -- a bad decision in the opener’s first minutes puts all our several heroes in continuing mortal danger, but each of them has problems of his own, and the Braugher character’s difficult relationship with his teenage stepdaughter is the dramatic center of the show.

Complicating matters are a crooked cop at the end of his rope, a shaky-handed Chinese hit man who’s also studying economics, and a corpse that won’t stay missing. The writers -- creator Norman Morrill, who worked on “Early Edition,” and David Manson, who co-created “Nothing Sacred” -- for the most part keep their heads above genre, and give even the worst characters a fair shake at complexity.

It benefits immensely from the presence of Braugher, at long last in a role that, like that of Det. Frank Pembleton on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” suits his particular intensity, the quietly simmering mix of righteousness and psychic disarray that he plays so well. He is no superhero -- he makes as many bad choices as good ones. Yancey Arias, Malik Yoba, Clifton Collins Jr., Michael Rooker, Will Yun Lee and Mae Whitman all do excellent work as well, their life-sized performances helping check the show’s occasional stylistic excesses.

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‘Heist’ and ‘Thief’

Where: NBC (“Heist”)

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

Where: FX (“Thief”)

When: 10 p.m. Tuesday

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)