The first thing the “Criminal” teaser shows is Charlie Hunnam (Leo Patterson) in profile behind the wheel of a car at night, a leather jacket on his shoulders and pink and green light drifting past the window. The second is a “prime original” card laid over a dark river and a lit bridge. Prime Video posted the footage on its own YouTube channel on Thursday, November 5th. It ends on the dates for both halves of the show, Part One, “Coward”, on January 13th, 2027, and Part Two, “Lawless”, on January 27th, 2027, with all four episodes of each part arriving at once. It is the first footage released from the series, which adapts the Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips comics from Image Comics. It is also far more confident about mood than it is about explanation.
Brubaker, who created the comics with Phillips, serves as co-showrunner with Jordan Harper, and Phillips is an executive producer. Prime Video’s synopsis follows Leo and his best friend Ricky Lawless (Gus Halper), “one trying to fight his way out of the world of crime they were raised in, the other desperate to follow in the footsteps of his father, a legendary outlaw.” When Ricky’s older brother Tracy (Luke Evans) returns home from the Army, “their tragic family history comes home with him.” Greta (Adria Arjona), a sharp-tongued car thief from Leo’s past, and Mallory (Emilia Clarke), Ricky’s girlfriend, are drawn into the orbit. The teaser promises the gunfights, heists and tragic romance that the synopsis lists, and then spends its running time declining to say how any of it connects. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for everything shown in the “Criminal” teaser.
The teaser promises the gunfights, heists and tragic romance that the synopsis lists, and then spends its running time declining to say how any of it connects.”
In order, it opens on Hunnam driving and the “prime original” card, then cuts to a red phone booth where Leo holds the receiver to his ear. A voice says, “Every single thing from this point on is how I say it is.” Greta is next, on a couch with her arm in a blue sling and a white dressing high on her chest, a phone pressed to her face. She is tearful, then looks up and away, and a scowling man appears half hidden behind a smear of orange light. Leo walks down a wet street past a second phone booth and a red neon sign as a voice says, “This is my job now.” Then a man in dark clothes sits in a high-backed chair in a dim amber room. A voice asks, “Do you believe that actions have consequences?”, and the question runs into a beat of black and a man lit red from one side, standing behind a ledge in the dark.
The temperature rises about 16 seconds in. Bay City Police cruisers sit angled outside a stone-fronted building, officers crouched behind their open doors with weapons raised. The same scene returns from inside a doorway at street level. A hazy figure stands behind a door marked PUSH, its glass already webbed with cracks, and the pane flashes white with an impact. A man in a white paramedic-style uniform, a surgical mask over his face, then aims a gun across an ornate lobby with a coffered gold ceiling. A card reads “FROM THE ACCLAIMED GRAPHIC NOVEL SERIES” in white and red block letters over a painted panel of a man falling backward with one hand flung open. The teaser slows for an overhead shot of a dark SUV and a white sedan parked side by side under a sign that reads “REDUCE SPEED TRAFFIC AHEAD”, and then for a silver case wrapped in red tape marked “EVIDENCE”. It reads like a heist going wrong, though the footage never says whose building it is.
Quieter images fill the next stretch. An older man in browline glasses and a patterned cardigan shuffles cards on a sofa, and three of them lie face up on the table in the next shot. Two teenage boys follow in a dim room, one talking out of focus while the other leans against a wood-paneled wall in a striped raglan shirt. Clarke’s Mallory, in a snakeskin-print jacket over a yellow top, leans toward a dark-haired man from the seat of a car at night. Two masked figures, one in a pink ski mask, then ride in a van as sparks burst beyond the windshield. A card reading “PART 1: COWARD” arrives over a painted, pulp-style face tinted blue and flecked with red. Hunnam stands in a yellow-lit room with boxing gear on the shelves behind him as his name drops in red letters. Arjona levels a gun toward the lens as hers does, and a finger rests against a trigger guard in extreme close-up.
A silver sedan flees down an autumn street with a police car close behind, and “PART 2: LAWLESS” appears over a battered pulp paperback. Its spine appears to read “The Last of the Innocent”, the title of a later Brubaker and Phillips miniseries, and its tagline says “He went home to forget her” and “He stayed to bury the past.” Evans turns up in a smoky purple-lit room, and Clarke appears in profile with a hoop earring against an orange glow. The teaser then steps into daylight at a gas station under a white steepled church. A young man in a plaid shirt with dark curly hair stands near a body lying in the road beside a white sedan, and then he lunges at the camera shouting. Blood is spattered across a windshield in the next shot. A woman runs across a dark lawn toward a parked car in front of a house strung with Christmas lights.
A bearded man in a black knit cap faces the back of a man in a white sweater, who is grabbed by the collar a moment later in a diner hung with colored lights. Officers in “BCPD” jackets work a crime scene on a church’s steps, where a body lies under a blue-green sheet among poinsettias. Two boys in dark suits then stand at a grave, and the flat headstone reads “Rebecca Lawless”, the surname Ricky and Tracy share, with dates that appear to run from 1950 to 1984. The footage offers no more than that. A tilted overhead shot shows a vault-like room with banded stacks of cash. A man’s legs lie across a doorstep with a blood trail running over the floorboards, and Hunnam and Arjona hold each other in a teal corridor.
An older man in browline glasses and a leather jacket stares with his jaw set, and then the picture goes black ahead of the line Prime Video also uses to open its YouTube description, “All you have to do is aim, breathe, and squeeze.” Under it, Hunnam in a denim jacket stands beside Arjona at a red barn, her arm in a sling and a revolver in her hand. In the wide shot he smiles with his hands in his pockets while she aims at a blurred target in the foreground. Cracked red and cream lettering from the title fills the frame, Evans snarls with blood at the corner of his mouth, and a bullet punches through paper just as the line ends. Hunnam, sweating in a red T-shirt, stands in a night street holding an automatic weapon. A white van disappears into a fireball in an overhead shot. The title card follows, “CRIMINAL” in white block letters on a red slab pocked with five bullet holes, then a card with the four leads’ names. A dim corridor then carries “NEW SERIES”, “JANUARY 13” over “CRIMINAL : COWARD”, and “JANUARY 27” over “CRIMINAL : LAWLESS”.
Prime Video’s release names Hunnam, Arjona, Evans and Clarke in its synopsis and says the series also stars Richard Jenkins, Kadeem Hardison, John Hawkes and Logan Browning, with a long recurring and guest list that includes Michael Mando, Garrett Hedlund, Patrick J. Adams, Pat Healy and Taylor Selé. The series is produced by Amazon MGM Studios with Basement Gang, Big Indie Pictures, Gowanus Projections and Legendary Television, and it streams in more than 240 countries and territories. The Part Two synopsis turns to Tracy, who “chose the Army over prison and never looked back” and must “return to the life he fled”. None of that backstory appears in the teaser, and the footage never says which of Evans’ scenes belong to which part.
The craft details may be the most interesting part. Brubaker told SKTCHD’s Off Panel podcast, according to Bleeding Cool, that “all the art in the title sequence for the show is by Sean”, and the painted pulp faces behind the part cards look like that kind of work, though the release text does not say which pieces are his. The same Bleeding Cool report has him saying the production shot a week of additional photography because the flashbacks in “Coward” were “just a little too minimal”. That meant bringing back the actors who play young Leo and young Ricky, so the two teenagers and the two boys in dark suits might be that material, a guess the teaser does not confirm. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the “Captain Marvel” directors, directed the first four episodes, and Prime Video calls the project an “interlocking universe” of crime stories.
What Do You Think? Is the man who asks about consequences the one Leo should be worried about, or is he just the first person in the footage to say the theme out loud? Does the “Rebecca Lawless” headstone belong to the history that follows Tracy home, or is it a decoy for the teaser? And with the first four episodes arriving on January 13th and the rest two weeks later, will you binge them in one night or hold Part One until Part Two lands?
See you on the next binge!
