Team Parker

My biggest complaint about the series finale of Leverage always has been that Nate deliberately selects Parker as his successor and then the show cheats on the follow-through. The only time we get to see this new team in action is a scene referencing Nate’s conversation with a client at the end of the series’ pilot; here, Parker deliberately apes Nate’s inflections and mannerisms.

Nate didn’t pick Parker because she’d be Nate, but because she was ready to be a leader as Parker, and yet for some reason that baffles me to this day (I assume the seemingly ever-present urge of all-too-many showrunners to be cute) they don’t let us see that.

Enter today’s big news: Leverage is coming back as an IMDb TV series, the Amazon-owned streaming service which has served as the show’s home since the rerun rights left WGN. Parker, Sophie, and Eliot return as regular characters (Hardison as a recurring)—with Nate Ford out and an unnamed new character played by Noah Wylie in.

Which is where I start to wince a bit. Not about Wylie, specifically, but because Wylie isn’t known these days to play second-fiddle (he’s referred to here as headlining the show), and after the writers didn’t let us see truly see Parker as team leader at the end of the series’ original run, I worry that this means we don’t get to see her as team leader in the series’ new run, either.

To steal a construction from an entirely different television show: let Parker be Parker.