Steal: Sophie Turner and Archie Madekwe star in surprisingly satisfying UK crime drama

Maybe it was a case of lowered expectations or maybe it is actually just pretty good, but Sophie Turner’s UK crime drama, Steal, really surprised.

It’s a satisfying six-parter that managed to sustain the tension after a banger of an opening episode.

It’s also a great role for Turner who hadn’t quite landed a vehicle that showcased the raw talent the Game of Thrones star clearly displayed when she was cast as a teen on the fantasy epic.

It opens on a normal day in the financial district of London, known to locals as “the city”. Suited-up workers are streaming into shiny glass towers, including Zara (Turner) and Luke (Archie Madekwe), who are in the operations team of a fiduciary fund responsible for investing the pensions of blue collar workers.

But it’s not going to be a normal day. A group of armed, black-clad gunmen storm onto the floor, demanding the transfer of £4 billion to an off-shore account. It’s tense as hell, and Zara and Luke are the ones who have to put through the transaction.

Their actions put them right in the thick of it, and Zara and Luke are grilled by the police, who suspect one or both of them were somehow involved. The gunmen knew all the internal processes of how such a large trade could be done and approved, so there had to have been someone on the inside.

The lead police investigator is Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, a detective with an inconvenient gambling habit, which is used against him by various interested parties that come into play, including MI5.

Oh yes, the British domestic intelligence service is involved, as is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and even celebrities as the story of the heist ensnares more and more people, casting a floodlight on the use of tax havens.

If you think too hard about it, Steal has a couple of non-red herring narrative dead ends and a plot hole or two, but you don’t have to because the series manages to be compelling and fast-paced enough that you’re happy to go along with it.

Central to that is Turner’s Zara, a relatively ordinary person who becomes embroiled in a massive scheme, able to barely scrape through at various points because of her wits and resourcefulness – that and she is underestimated at almost every turn.

Turner is able to balance Zara’s defiance and emotional baggage so that her contradictions make her a real person, when it could’ve been so easy for the character to slip into unrealistic and inconsistent.

It makes the character easy to root for, and a good choice as an audience surrogate. You are on Zara’s side, even though her decisions are not necessarily ones you’d make.

There are one too many twists but that’s not unexpected for the heist genre, and the eventual reveal is perfectly gratifying. It’s not mindblowing but you’re not going to be mad about it. It might even provoke some questions the series is trying to raise.

Steal was created by Sotiris Nikitas, who is a relative newcomer to the screen industry but who cut his teeth plotting with a series of crime novels he wrote under the pen name of Ray Celestin.

For an enjoyable diversion that doesn’t demand too much of you, but which pays in entertaining dividends, Steal is worthy of capturing your attention.

Steal is streaming on Prime Video