This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Financial crime is tricky to portray on television. Nowadays there is nothing physical to steal. No matter how vast the sums of money, they mostly exist as pixels on a screen and lines of computer code. Traders and bankers can shout, yell and stab frantically at their keyboards but after a while it gets repetitive.
How then to dramatise a multi-billion heist? Steal, Amazon Prime’s enthralling new six-part financial crime thriller, solves the problem quite neatly: a gang of gunmen and women invade a pension management fund office in the City.
Amidst much terror, shouting and some fairly brutal beatings, the gang, wearing some weirdly repulsive facial prosthetics to fool the CCTV, force all the staff into a couple of rooms.
Two junior staff members, Zara and Luke, are pulled out and forced at gunpoint to make a series of trades which the firm’s management is compelled to sign off. Bang goes several billion pounds and the gang escapes.
At this point, even a casual observer might notice that the gang seem remarkably well informed about the complicated procedures needed to move the billions around, and what needs to be said to the various intermediaries to convince them to follow Zara and Luke’s instructions. This is the first hint that the heist may, in fact, be an inside job. Who then are the traitor baddies?
Zara, marvellously played by Sophie Turner, is the stand-out star of this rollercoaster series. Best known for her highly praised debut as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, Turner brings depth and complexity to the role. Her electric performance is laced with sporadic regal, glacial disdain for the fools with whom she is too often forced to engage.
Yet she also shows vulnerability, courage and determination — especially when dealing with her estranged mother and trying to navigate their tortured, painful relationship.
Meanwhile, the cops are on the trail of the robbers, led by Rhys Kovaci, convincingly played by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd. Kovaci, a notably smart cookie, soon suspects that the heist is an inside job.
The writer Sotiris Nikitas, also known as the crime novelist Ray Celestin, invests heavily and successfully in character development. The interplay between Zara and her policeman pursuer is nicely developed with several twists and turns. Kovaci has his own ghosts and a serious gambling habit that threatens to crash his career, if not his whole life.
At the same time, MI5 are on Zara’s tail. Once again the British state’s protectors are shown as utterly ruthless. MI5, one officer explains to Zara as calmly as ordering a cappuccino, can make anyone completely disappear.
As for poor Luke, her somewhat hapless colleague, he soon ends up kidnapped and held hostage by the gang. Its members are not mindless thugs, but show intelligence and awareness of how the global financial system works. But they are also ready to inflict savage violence when they believe it is needed.
Nikitas, who previously worked in a financial services company, weaves in some subtle points about the morality of such vast amounts of money. The firm’s managers and key account supervisors are pulling in around £1 million a year.
Zara and Luke are paid a tiny fraction of that, even though the company could not function without them. It all goes wrong for the robbers, and they eventually turn on each other. But at the same time the missing money is popping up in all sorts of embarrassing places such as tax havens used by celebrities and politicians.
Overall, Steal is exhilarating viewing as Sophie Turner, next to be seen as Lara Croft in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s eagerly awaited Tomb Raider, steals the show.
Unfamiliar, Netflix’s gripping new six-part German spy series, unfolds in Berlin in the present day whilst looping back to Belarus 16 years ago. Two former German spies, Simon and Meret, are living in the German capital with their teenage daughter Nina. The couple run a restaurant and a safe house for people in danger.
They believe they have left their past lives behind and can enjoy their comfortable domesticity. But they are wrong, of course, and their past has merely been dormant. Their deeds and decisions in Belarus soon come crashing back into their everyday lives.
The old mission, or cold case, that suddenly reanimates, upending characters’ lives years later, is a hardy perennial of crime and espionage fiction and drama. Here the bad guy is a menacing Russian spy who was intimately involved with the Belarus operation — but is set to hide in plain sight as the husband of the new Russian ambassador to Germany.
There are echoes here of The Americans, the series about deep cover Russian agents in the United States that ran for six seasons. Simon and Meret are Germans, living in Germany. But their identities are fake, and their relationship with their daughter Nina is built on a lie.
Paul Coates, the series creator, steadily ramps up the tension and danger in each episode. The overall storyline is skilfully executed, and the action scenes are notably well choreographed.
Meret proves herself a savage fighter when threatened and a rally-class driver when pursued. Yet at the same time she is a ferociously protective mother, completely focused on safeguarding Nina.
Unfamiliar delivers a smart, fast-paced, classic spy thriller whilst also asking some sharp questions about identity, loyalty and the unforeseen consequences of actions taken long ago.
