Hustle and Leverage: A Comparison
Mar. 8th, 2009 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Twig commented on this post - http://redfiona99.livejournal.com/524124.html - which was originally a spin off from her post about motivation, and that bit of my post was about how I thought the motivation, or lack thereof, was one of the major problems with Hustle. In her reply, she said that other people had said that Leverage was too similar to Hustle. Entirely seperately to this, I decided to give Leverage a try (okay, so if you give me Christian Kane kicking people, I will watch your show. I am easy to please.). Having watched both, I really don't get why people say Leverage is ripping off Hustle. There are some similarities, yes, but also a whole huge tonne of differences.
Main Hustle crew, first three series.
Albert - played by Robert Vaughan, he's the aged leader, and plan maker.
Mickey - played by Adrian Lester, lead male character, secondary plan maker.
Danny - played by Marc Warren, tag-along kid and junior partner.
Stacey - played by Jamie Murray, female lead, person mostly likely to be sent to romance the mark.
These are all front of house players. The remaining member of the gang, Ash, (played by Robert Glennister) is in charge of tech and comms, and tends to be more backstage.
All are con-artists. Only Ash has a specialisation, although he too can con someone face to face. All activities are long cons.
Leverage
Nate - played by Timothy Hutton, maker of plans, an honest man, allegedly.
Sophie - played by Gina Bellman, con artist and mark seducer.
Eliot - played by Christian Kane, he mostly kicks things.
Hardison - played by Aldis Hodge, tech and comms.
Parker - played by Beth Riesgraf, breaking and entering
All have been front of house, but Hardison and Parker tend to be more backstage. All have a speciality, although there is some overlap. While what they do are long cons, they're often over a much shorter time scale, with the exception being 'The Bank Job' and possibly the season finale.
So, mostly different ways of doing things, and slightly different speeds of the con.
There are some equivalent characters, Sophie and Stacey are both tall, dark and pretty, and are mostly there because they're attractive, female con artists. Ash and Hardison are both tech guys, although that's about the only similarity between the characters. Noticably there is no Parker or Eliot equivalent. Possibly that's because of the way UK TV works, as the last time I can remember a choreographed fight scene on UK TV was Captain Jack and John Hart in Torchwood, and they're not really a feature of UK programmes as much as they are in the US, certainly not since things like The Sweeney and the Professionals finished. The above also goes, possibly even more, for falling/hanging stunts and the rest of Parker's main tasks.
Hustle is supposed to be set in a semi-realistic milleu, which is part of the reason why there are no guns or fights, while Leverage seems to inhabit the hyper-realistic world peculiar to US TV, where all the flowers bloom brighter than they ever should but no one mentions a thing.
Differences also include the ethos behind the teams. Nate's team are good guys who do bad things, while Mickey's team are bad guys who do bad things. And aren't given good enough scripts to pull that off successfully, IMO.
While both have a theme of "family" going on, they do it in different ways. If Leverage is Mummy, Daddy and 3 kids, then Hustle is a more extended family with Albert being the twinkly grandfather figure, Ash being the cool uncle and the other three being the kids.
Hustle pushes the "family" things less, there's more of a passing on of traditions, with Albert, an old school crook, being worried that his kind of caper, the long con, is about to become extinct. Mickey is his protege and Danny wants to be his protege.
Stylistically is where I think the suggestion of similarities comes in. Both use background music that's late 50s, early 60s lounge, with big brass and brush drums, particularly during the "action" scenes and the "power walk to camera" scenes.
Both shows also make use of 'broken time', where a character stops the flow of time to think or plan. Hustle does this more inventively, using the device to flashback/flashforward/tell the story/tell the mark's background and to teach, normally direct to Danny, the history of this kind of con. Leverage is more conservative, it uses most of its time stops as flashbacks to either give us backstory on the characters or to fill us in on what one group of the characters has been doing while we've been concentrating another group.
Some of the similarities; the description of the mark, the explanation of the plan, the sequence that goes - putting the plan into action, oops a hitch, resolution of the story using on of plans B through to Z - are down to the genre. As such, it's difficult to see how Leverage could have done it differently and kept to the rules of the game.
They certainly feel like different shows to me, Leverage being more emotionally driven, being as it is a drama comedy. It's horrific moments are certainly more horrific. Hustle is a comedy-drama, so several of the characters are more caricatures that characters and any terribleness beyond being rude/abrasive or conning someone else tends to take place off screen.
So, while they share a genre and have some similarities, I don't think the two are that closely related.
Main Hustle crew, first three series.
Albert - played by Robert Vaughan, he's the aged leader, and plan maker.
Mickey - played by Adrian Lester, lead male character, secondary plan maker.
Danny - played by Marc Warren, tag-along kid and junior partner.
Stacey - played by Jamie Murray, female lead, person mostly likely to be sent to romance the mark.
These are all front of house players. The remaining member of the gang, Ash, (played by Robert Glennister) is in charge of tech and comms, and tends to be more backstage.
All are con-artists. Only Ash has a specialisation, although he too can con someone face to face. All activities are long cons.
Leverage
Nate - played by Timothy Hutton, maker of plans, an honest man, allegedly.
Sophie - played by Gina Bellman, con artist and mark seducer.
Eliot - played by Christian Kane, he mostly kicks things.
Hardison - played by Aldis Hodge, tech and comms.
Parker - played by Beth Riesgraf, breaking and entering
All have been front of house, but Hardison and Parker tend to be more backstage. All have a speciality, although there is some overlap. While what they do are long cons, they're often over a much shorter time scale, with the exception being 'The Bank Job' and possibly the season finale.
So, mostly different ways of doing things, and slightly different speeds of the con.
There are some equivalent characters, Sophie and Stacey are both tall, dark and pretty, and are mostly there because they're attractive, female con artists. Ash and Hardison are both tech guys, although that's about the only similarity between the characters. Noticably there is no Parker or Eliot equivalent. Possibly that's because of the way UK TV works, as the last time I can remember a choreographed fight scene on UK TV was Captain Jack and John Hart in Torchwood, and they're not really a feature of UK programmes as much as they are in the US, certainly not since things like The Sweeney and the Professionals finished. The above also goes, possibly even more, for falling/hanging stunts and the rest of Parker's main tasks.
Hustle is supposed to be set in a semi-realistic milleu, which is part of the reason why there are no guns or fights, while Leverage seems to inhabit the hyper-realistic world peculiar to US TV, where all the flowers bloom brighter than they ever should but no one mentions a thing.
Differences also include the ethos behind the teams. Nate's team are good guys who do bad things, while Mickey's team are bad guys who do bad things. And aren't given good enough scripts to pull that off successfully, IMO.
While both have a theme of "family" going on, they do it in different ways. If Leverage is Mummy, Daddy and 3 kids, then Hustle is a more extended family with Albert being the twinkly grandfather figure, Ash being the cool uncle and the other three being the kids.
Hustle pushes the "family" things less, there's more of a passing on of traditions, with Albert, an old school crook, being worried that his kind of caper, the long con, is about to become extinct. Mickey is his protege and Danny wants to be his protege.
Stylistically is where I think the suggestion of similarities comes in. Both use background music that's late 50s, early 60s lounge, with big brass and brush drums, particularly during the "action" scenes and the "power walk to camera" scenes.
Both shows also make use of 'broken time', where a character stops the flow of time to think or plan. Hustle does this more inventively, using the device to flashback/flashforward/tell the story/tell the mark's background and to teach, normally direct to Danny, the history of this kind of con. Leverage is more conservative, it uses most of its time stops as flashbacks to either give us backstory on the characters or to fill us in on what one group of the characters has been doing while we've been concentrating another group.
Some of the similarities; the description of the mark, the explanation of the plan, the sequence that goes - putting the plan into action, oops a hitch, resolution of the story using on of plans B through to Z - are down to the genre. As such, it's difficult to see how Leverage could have done it differently and kept to the rules of the game.
They certainly feel like different shows to me, Leverage being more emotionally driven, being as it is a drama comedy. It's horrific moments are certainly more horrific. Hustle is a comedy-drama, so several of the characters are more caricatures that characters and any terribleness beyond being rude/abrasive or conning someone else tends to take place off screen.
So, while they share a genre and have some similarities, I don't think the two are that closely related.
