‘Leverage: Redemption’ gets the good/bad gang back together for IMDb TV reboot

“Leverage: Redemption” star Beth Riesgraf puts on a thick cowboy drawl when she sums up her show: “Sometimes bad guys are the only good guys you get.”

Almost a decade after “Leverage” left the air after five seasons, the thief (Riesgraf), the grifter (Gina Bellman), the hacker (Aldis Hodge) and the hitter (Christian Kane) are back in business for IMDb TV’s reboot, which premiered Friday, once again posing the question: Can good guys do bad things for good reasons, and still be good?

In the place of Timothy Hutton’s mastermind Nate Ford — Hutton, who was accused in March 2020 of raping a 14-year-old girl in 1983, has been written out of the show — is Harry Wilson, a corporate lawyer and fixer played by Noah Wyle with boyish glee and terrifying naivety.

Like the original, the Leverage team’s process remains the same: find a bad guy and take him down, whatever it takes. Their methods may straddle the line between good and evil, but it’s all for the right reason.

“It’s the intention behind it that matters,” Riesgraf, who plays thief Parker, told the Daily News. “They see somebody who’s helpless against a force that they can’t control, that they can’t fight back against, and that’s when the ‘Leverage: Redemption’ team comes into play. We may have to do some things that are questionable and ethically not the most sound, but at the end of the day, it’s for the greater good or it’s going to help someone’s life change for the better or reestablish some peace in their life that they deserve.”

This time, though, most of the missions come from Harry in his quest to wipe clean his moral chalkboard.

“He needs to figure out how to atone for the things that he’s done, for his sins. But he doesn’t know how to do it, so ironically he meets a team of bad guys who teach him how to be a good guy because they’ve already done this work. They’ve already figured out that you can’t erase your own misdeeds, you can’t erase your past. All you can do is make different choices moving forward,” Wyle, best known for playing John Carter on “ER,” told The News.

“That’s redemption. It’s not a single act of contrition. It’s not a confessional and then you’re absolved of all of your sins. It’s a daily practice. It’s a way of life. Under their tutelage and sometimes their hazing, he starts to figure that out.”

Bellman, whose grifter Sophie Devereaux takes on a reluctant makeshift leadership role, called it “redressing the balance.”

“They’re so amazing at what they do that they could have extremely thrilling, adrenaline-pumped lives, living it up with all the things that people aspire to. But they genuinely want to help people,” she told The News. “I think these are good people that genuinely want to make a difference and help others.”

The joy of “Leverage: Redemption” comes in how they help. Parker still loves crawling through vents and Sophie can still only act in a con. Elliot is still the best fighter around.

“The first time around when we did this (show), the economy wasn’t that great, people were upset about all kinds of stuff. You sat on the couch and we did the punching of the people you wanted to hit but legally can’t. And now, we’re coming out of a pandemic when everyone has so much angst and they want to hit something. It doesn’t matter what it is. They want to hit something. So they’re going to sit on the couch again and we’re going to punch the things they want to punch,” Kane told The News. “We’re doing the dirty work that you want to do.

“Sometimes an ass whoopin’ is the only thing that can wake you up.”

Hardison only appears briefly, due to Hodge’s prior shooting schedule, but his hacker is replaced flawlessly by his foster sister Breanna, played by Aleyse Shannon, who brings a Gen Z humor and apprehension to the role.

Breanna, unlike Harry, doesn’t have wrongs to right. She didn’t have to wake up to the seedy underbelly of the world because she’s always known it.

“Power and how people acquire power is very secretive and not a lot of people are privy to that information. It’s hidden. Sometimes that acquisition of power is insidious. It takes, sometimes, people who know the same insidiousness of how to achieve power to also break it down,” Shannon told The News. “Sometimes you have to play by the rules to break the rules.”

It’s a common refrain throughout “Leverage,” the question of how far you can go before you become one of the bad guys.

“I keep coming back to this theme of an examined life,” Wyle told The News.

“None of these heroic characters are classic heroes. They’re all flawed individuals who accept and embrace their flaws and have just been able to shift their thinking and their perspective to apply those skill sets for good. They’re not doing it because they’re do-gooders. They’re not doing it because they’re saintly. They’re doing it because there’s need and they can and they’ve come to the conclusion that that’s the best way to live their life.”

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