It may be a new year, but we’re not ready to close the book on 2023 quite yet. All week, Vulture TV critics will be offering recommendations for the programming they loved last year but didn’t have the bandwidth to cover. (There was a lot of TV, okay?!)
These days, money is increasingly a matter of ones and zeros, and that it’s only going to become more so as we drift deeper into the future presents an interesting question for crime fiction. If the most significant heists of the 21st century are going to involve digital intangibles like bitcoin or offshore bank accounts, can the thieving of such assets ever make for gripping visual drama? Mr. Robot suggested a path of how we may get to a yes, but then every once in a while a show like The Gold comes by to remind you of the tangible power of masked bandits lifting a bunch of gold bars and trying to make them disappear into thin air. Sure, robbers can always “learn to code,†but some truths can’t be denied: Blood, sweat, and gold always mix well.
The Gold understands this. Produced by the BBC and Paramount+, the 2023 series tackles what’s known as the Brink’s-Mat Robbery, said to be one of the most prominent achievements in the British underworld. Taking place in 1983 — thick in the era of perms, chunky briefcases, and the U.K.’s rightward slide precipitated by accelerating market capitalism under Margaret Thatcher — the heist saw almost 7,000 gold bars, probably worth around £100 million today, nabbed from a warehouse just outside Heathrow Airport. The heist’s legend is principally tethered to the fact of its success, given that half the gold remains missing to this day, but it’s also informed by the slight air of a curse: A police officer was killed during the investigation, and in its long aftermath, the British underworld was apparently rife with retaliatory murders.
Any crime procedural built around a widely discussed event faces the challenge of needing to be more than details easily extracted from a Google search. Ryan Murphy has known this for years, and he mostly solves the problem through an excess deployment of camp and perversion. For The Gold, series creator Neil Forsyth (Guilt, Bob Servant) opts to play it straighter down the middle, delivering prime cuts of the fundamental genre pleasures: criminals doing criminal stuff, detectives trying to stop them, and an entire vivid universe that exists between them.
All great crime stories are at their core about systems and logistics. You might successfully take off with a mountain of gold bars, but you also presumably want to spend them, which means you need a way to legitimize the haul. So, despite shouldering the immediate risk, the robbers ultimately play a bit part in The Gold’s six episodes. After a propulsive opening depicting the warehouse stickup, they’re quickly sidelined as The Gold settles its attention on the actual hub of the criminal enterprise: Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden, last seen as a hapless intelligence operative in Slow Horses), a fence with volcanic intensity who swiftly moves to build the infrastructure to disappear the stolen gold. To do so, he conscripts a web of direct and indirect confederates, including a smelter, John Palmer (Tom Cullen), to melt down all those marked bars, and a lawyer, Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper, synergistic with the surname), who establishes a network of financial instruments to launder the goods. Noye finds his rival in DCI Brian Boyce (Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville), an army veteran who leads a special task force housed within the Flying Squad — the hilariously named division within the London Metropolitan Police focused on organized crime — that also includes upstart detectives Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) and Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott).
The sprawling ensemble gives a robust shape to this cops-and-robbers story, which tugs on a few other narrative threads that give The Gold additional thematic heft. Through a constellation of opposing forces, Forsyth exhibits a distinct interest in what these characters, who are fictionalized versions of real people, say about a British class structure momentarily destabilized in the 1980s. In The Gold, everybody is trying to break out of systems: Cooper, the lawyer, is married into an old-money family who persistently demeans him, and so he takes to the underworld as a path toward realizing his own status; Jennings, a cop who’s the daughter of a criminal and often the lone woman in the workplace, is trying to shatter both the glass ceiling and her own family baggage; Boyce wants to bring order to and through a corrupt police force; Noye is reaching for immortality.
That combination of ingredients makes for immensely watchable stuff, but those going into the experience should note The Gold’s particular quirk, which is a tendency toward the outrageously verbose. Forsyth’s script has all the subtlety of a garbage truck, and it seems to delight in running over you again and again with the themes it’s trying to impart. “The thing about gold is, if you have enough of it, it will give you a life you didn’t have any business dreaming about,†one character says late in the series, when everybody involved probably knows this bit of insight a hundred times over. The sheer number of monologues packed into this show rivals the collected works of Mike Flanagan, and everyone seems to work from the same vocabulary; note how many times the word “villain†is said as a descriptor, a badge of honor, a philosophical idea, or as a throwaway epithet.
That said, The Gold’s verbosity isn’t necessarily a negative, because it does produce some pulpy lines that are fun as hell. There’s a mid-season scene where Cooper meets up with a shadowy associate, Gordon Parry (Sean Harris, memorable as a villain in the Mission: Impossible franchise), who’s a little unhappy about the pace at which things are going. As means to end the conversation, Harris, who simply has one of the best voices of any actor working today, croaks, “I’ve got to escape. Call you later. Slowly, slowly catchy monkey, Mr. Cooper.†What a sublime combination of words. I whooped at its utterance.
To be sure, there’s a point to all the loquacity. Stories and self-narratives are forms of power, and it’s as if the characters monologue as a way to steel themselves against the punishing weight of their circumstances and the systems designed to grind them down. There are even moments where The Gold seems to knowingly recognize the banality in the bloviation — after all, some things can’t be transcended. For the characters in The Gold, it’s their fates as dictated by what actually happened. Many of the criminals are captured despite their philosophizing. DCI Boyce hems and haws about the finer points of policework, but eventually he and his team will come to realize that half the gold remains missing. As much as they struggle against their constraints, they exist within a closed loop. For now, at least. In the real world, the story isn’t quite over, and a second season is apparently on the way.