It takes approximately 3,600 hours of on-the-job training to qualify as a police detective in the UK – or about 1,000 hours of true-crime content. Once you’re up to date on 24 Hours in Police Custody, can accurately guess the killer within the opening strains of the Dateline theme tune (pro tip: it’s the husband), and have developed a strong working theory on the Jill Dando assassination, you should be automatically granted powers of arrest, shouldn’t you?
Similarly, while watching Dope Thief, the Apple TV+ miniseries (streaming from 14 March) about a pair of small-time stick-up guys, played by Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura, any ordinary viewer will feel they’d climb the cartel’s promotion track faster than these knuckleheads. I know I would. You don’t watch all five seasons of The Wire and Breaking Bad, plus six of Better Call Saul, without picking up a thing or two about evading police detection and the importance of a clear managerial structure among meth-heads. Meanwhile, these dumb-dumbs are stumbling on to the eastern seaboard’s main drug-trafficking corridor, without so much as pressing play on Narcos season one. Which is especially weird, because Moura also starred in that one.
