Can we care about another criminal?

Source：USA TODAY
Date：8/16/2006
By Bill Keveney

The show：Smith
The premiere:：Sept. 19 (10 p.m. ET/PT), CBS

The concept：The leader of a theft ring tries to stay ahead of the law while keeping loved ones from discovering his secret life.

The challenge：Making viewers care enough about criminals to watch regularly.

Less-than-sympathetic lead characters have been a staple of film, theater and literature, where audience engagement is required only for a fixed, limited time.

But they have been a rarer occurrence on television, which asks viewers to bond for scores of episodes over a number of years. That challenge faces Smith, a new drama that centers on a skilled thief, his crew and their elaborate heists.

Executive producer John Wells hopes other parts of the criminals' personalities will strike a chord with viewers. The thief, Bobby Stevens (Ray Liotta), and wife Hope (Virginia Madsen), who isn't part of the crew but has her own shady past, have some decent traits. They love their kids and have a normal-looking family life that Bobby keeps apart from his criminal activities.

"I hope (viewers) identify with them, develop some sympathy for them and, by the end of the year, hope they get caught," Wells says.

Bobby wants to avoid violence, and is troubled when a Pittsburgh art museum heist results in death. That separates him from Jeff (Simon Baker), a colleague who kills without conscience, Liotta says.

Bobby, who gets his assignments from the mysterious Charlie (Shohreh Aghdashloo), is "hopefully the guy you follow (because) he has enough likability," says Liotta, who played a charismatic crook in Goodfellas. "It's kind of like on Goodfellas or any movie about people who do things against the law. You don't necessarily root for them (but) people are intrigued by it."

The criminal crew, which features characters played by Jonny Lee Miller, Amy Smart and Franky G, will commit a few crimes during the season. Wells says he hopes to shoot jobs in Montreal, Salt Lake City and Miami.The thieves will pay a price. "Not everybody will survive the first season," he says.

Although viewers presumably aren't stealing Picassos, Madsen says they may see something familiar: a sharp divergence between their occupations and home lives.

"I kind of live that way. I live in suburbia. I take kids to school. I make kids dinnerat night. But I'm a movie star, so there's

From USA Today.