White Collar, Bravo

And then along comes episode one of White Collar, a wry drama about a FBI agent and a master thief, and suddenly everything looks sublimely easy. Casting is all, and White Collar’s twin leads have an easy rapport that makes you believe that agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) really has spent three years pursuing the mercurial Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) for crimes including bond forgery, counterfeiting and art theft.

The dynamic between the pair is that while Burke, from the FBI’s White Collar crime squad in New York, is dogged, methodical and somewhat put-upon, Caffrey is ludicrously handsome, groomed and charismatic. While Burke plods, Caffrey soars effortlessly, so rich in wit, guile and chutzpah that if he decides to break out of a high-security prison (as he did in the opening sequence), success is inevitable. Perhaps the notion that he ordered himself a prison guard’s uniform over the internet and nobody at the prison bothered to search the package stretched credibility somewhat, but the action zinged along so scintillatingly that you didn’t want to worry about it.

Not everyone may warm to the idea of finding a compulsive career criminal attractive and endearing. But hell, he is, and series creator Jeff Eastin has ensured that Caffrey’s crimes are more about style and audacity than brutal armed robbery or defrauding the working man.

In addition, there’s a skilfully drawn emotional dimension that lifts White Collar out of the procedural grime. Caffrey’s jail-break was motivated not by criminality, but by his desperation to try to stop his girlfriend Kate from leaving him. Too late! When Burke tracked Caffrey down, he found him depressed and deflated in his empty apartment, resigned to being recaptured. But, heading back to the slammer, Caffrey suggested a deal - he could help Burke find his latest criminal nemesis, a forger nicknamed the Dutchman, if Burke could get Caffrey (pictured, played by Matt Bomer) released from jail into his custody.

Burke suspected that Caffrey’s true motive was to get out and find Kate. However, this earned him a rebuke from his wife Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiessen), who dared him to say he wouldn’t be willing to break out of jail for her. Cut to Caffrey coming out of prison, electronically tagged, and Burke installing him in a bug-ridden flophouse.

Naturally this low-rent dive in what looked like Harlem wasn’t good enough for the ace conman. Within hours, he’d met a kind-hearted dowager (Diahann Carroll) in a local thrift store, and charmed her into inviting him to live in her mansion on Riverside Drive. Burke’s face, surveying Caffrey’s palatial new surroundings, was an essay on the grotesquely unjust gulf between the honest hard-working joe and the criminally undeserving.

Deftly threaded through all this was the pursuit of the Dutchman and his cunning plan to forge valuable Spanish Victory Bonds from the 1940s. Caffrey, with a little help from his crafty underworld fixer Mozzie (Willie Garson), kept delivering blinding flashes of insight that propelled the investigation forward in leaps and bounds, so it seemed worse than churlish when Burke threatened to send him back to jail if they didn’t catch their quarry. Equally entertaining was the running subplot about Caffrey’s intuitive rapport with women, not least Elizabeth Burke, woefully neglected by a workaholic husband whose dinner often ends up in the family Labrador.

Somehow she still loves him, even though he's like a walking billboard for crass male insensitivity. In one delicious exchange in Burke’s car, Caffrey asked the haggard-looking agent about his plans for the weekend. He said he’d be doing some DIY and taking Elizabeth to the ballgame because “she likes to watch the Giants.” “Uh-huh,” Caffrey replied. “Even on your anniversary?” Immaculate.