14 Years Later, TNT's Criminally Overlooked Action Series Is Officially Free on Streaming

Bad guys still often make the best good guys

Looking back, the late 2000s marked a short, largely unsung golden age for quirky TV antiheroes. It was like every showrunner in Los Angeles tuned in to a marathon of The Saint around the same time, which led to a short but memorable fascination with crime-fighting criminals.

This was the heyday of shows about spies, thieves, and con men, who were all forced into using their skills to deal with worse crooks than themselves. For whatever reason, most of these ran on the USA Network, such as White Collar, Burn Notice, and Psych, but one of the best ran for five seasons on TNT.

That was Leverage, a weekly heist show about a crew of master criminals recruited for targeted scams against the rich and powerful. It's been a cult favorite for over a decade, but Leverage has also been notoriously hard to find in syndication or on streaming platforms. Now all but Leverage’s most recent season has been made available for free on YouTube via ElectricNOW, the official channel of its production company Electric Entertainment.

Leverage begins with Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton), who used to be an insurance investigator. When Nate's own company refused to cover a treatment that could've saved his son's life, Nate quit the business.

Nate subsequently gets recruited to run the kind of heist that he used to stop, alongside a crew of some of the same criminals that he used to chase. Elliot Spencer (Christian Kane) is a "retrieval specialist," which is another way to say he can kick just about anyone's ass. Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge) is the best hacker in the world. Parker (Beth Riesgraf) is a legendary thief.

When the heist turns into a double-cross, Nate recruits his former flame Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman), a struggling actress and incredible con artist, and goes after their former employer.

That counter-heist goes well enough that the crew sticks together. With Nate as their mastermind, they exclusively go after rich and powerful criminals on behalf of the people who they've hurt. Their first front company is named after their mission: as Nate says in every episode’s intro, they're here to provide leverage.

Leverage's original run is an odd time capsule. Part of that is because Hardison is on the cutting edge of 2008 technology, so the show often puts an emphasis on what are now hopelessly antiquated cellphones, but it's primarily a question of history. When the show first aired, the Great Recession was in full swing, and many episodes' plots are taken straight from then-recent headlines. Get used to hearing about both clients and targets who were impacted in some way by the "credit crunch."

Let's go steal some catharsis

Leverage is essentially about schadenfreude. Every episode sees the wealthy and corrupt being served their just desserts, courtesy of five of the most consistently competent characters in the history of this genre. (During its original run, the showrunners found that the fans loved watching the core Leverage crew plan and banter enough that it evolved its own referential phrase: "competence porn.") While not every episode is created equal, most of them are tight, 45-minute heist capers with careful setups, detestable antagonists, and a satisfying payoff. Each season does have an overarching plot, but they often take a backseat to villain-of-the-week stories where Leverage Consulting & Associates take down people who truly have it coming: real estate scammers, corporate spies, mob bosses, etc.

Leverage's co-creator John Rogers maintained a blog during the show's original run where he discussed many behind-the-scenes details, and while that blog hasn't been updated in a decade, it's still up. The blog often includes each episode's real-life inspirations, a look at the technologies involved, and some insights on the craft of filming TV. If you're watching Leverage for the first time in 2026, it's well worth chasing each episode with the matching blog entry whenever possible.

Anecdotally, Leverage never quite seemed to get the audience it deserved. Those who’ve seen it, especially during its original run, are often fans to this day, and you can see Leverage's influence crop up in some of the weirdest places. (For example, there's a side story in Atomic Robo that is distinctly "Leverage, but in 11th-century Constantinople.") Still, Leverage didn't appear to catch onto the culture as hard as the other shows in its lane did, especially Burn Notice. I’m consistently shocked by how few people have even heard of Leverage, let alone have seen any of it.

Leverage did and does have enough of an audience, however, that Amazon greenlit a 3-season revival that ran on Prime Video between 2021 and 2025. Leverage: Redemption is initially set eight years after the original series ended, and features the return of Bellman, Kane, and Riesgraf. Hodge is limited to only special appearances in each season of Redemption, due to his commitments to other shows, while Hutton doesn't appear at all. In fact, the pilot episode of Redemption takes place on the anniversary of Nate Ford's death.

Instead, Redemption co-stars Aleyse Shannon as Breanna Casey, an engineer and Hardison's foster sister, and Noah Wyle (ER, The Librarians) as Harry Wilson, who's looking to make up for his former life as a shady corporate lawyer. The titular redemption, in fact, is Harry’s.

The lack of Hutton, in particular, means that Redemption has a different overall theme and rhythm than the original run – Harry doesn’t have Nate Ford’s distinctive hard-drinking Boston Catholic rage, which was the core engine of many of Leverage’s stories – but any Leverage is better than none. The first two seasons of Redemption are also available on ElectricNOW, and they're worth a watch if you're still looking for more after you finish season 5 of the first series.

In a proper ethical universe, Leverage would've never gone off the air in the first place. It could've easily run as long as NCIS, trading out team members and settings as circumstances dictated, with a new elaborate heist each week at the expense of whatever tech bro, corporate raider, or random scumbag caught the writers' eye. It's a shame and a waste that we don't live in that timeline. (Although we have gotten The Librarians instead from many of the same people, so there is some balance in this place.)

Leverage is "just" 116 episodes of fast-moving, smartly-written crime comedy/drama. If you've never seen it, it might just be your next obsession.