Detective Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law) is extremely committed to his job, but it brings him no satisfaction. The long hours he dedicates to crime-busting with the LAPD have alienated his teenage son and infuriated his wife, Candace (Gabrielle Dennis), to the point where Isaiah is sleeping in the summer house. He is permanently vexed. But he isn’t meant to be happy: he’s a maverick cop.
The maverick-copness of its lead character is the first of many crime-show cliches shamelessly replicated by Nemesis, the first Netflix show from writer Courtney A Kemp, creator of the gangster drama Power and its various spin-offs. Isaiah carries the trauma of an old case where a junior colleague was killed in pursuit of a gang of elite thieves: now, whenever a robbery goes down in Los Angeles – and a big one has just happened, with bags of cash brazenly swiped from a posh party’s high-stakes poker game – Isaiah suspects that his white whale, the man who pulled the trigger years ago, is behind it. To the consternation of colleagues, he has a whiteboard in his office covered in photographs and sticky notes.
