TL;DR: Steal is an imperfect but addictive Prime Video thriller anchored by a standout performance from Sophie Turner. Its layered conspiracy and thematic ambition occasionally overwhelm the story, but strong momentum and a compelling central character make it a binge-worthy ride for crime and heist fans.
Steal
There are few things that hit my dopamine receptors harder than a good heist story. Add in a government conspiracy, a morally gray protagonist, and the creeping realization that capitalism itself might be the real villain, and I’m already halfway through the season before Prime Video asks if I’m still watching. That’s exactly what happened with Steal, a six-episode thriller that grabbed me by the collar early, occasionally tripped over its own ambition, but never once let go.
Created by S.A. Nikias and fronted by a locked-in, firing-on-all-cylinders Sophie Turner, Steal is not a perfect miniseries. It’s messy. It’s occasionally overstuffed. And by the time it reaches its final revelations, it maybe believes in its own cleverness a little too much. But here’s the thing: I could not stop watching it. This is premium binge fuel, the kind of show that makes you forgive its flaws because the ride itself is too compulsive to abandon.
Steal knows exactly which genre buttons it’s pushing, and it pushes them hard.
The setup is deceptively simple. A group of masked thieves storm into a financial firm called Lochmill Capital and force a small team of employees to transfer millions of pounds out of pension funds. It’s violent, terrifying, and executed with enough procedural detail to feel grounded rather than cartoonish. Our way into this chaos is Zara, Turner’s exhausted, underpaid, emotionally adrift office worker who suddenly finds herself at the epicenter of something much bigger than a robbery gone wrong.
What starts as a traumatic workplace crime quickly mutates into something far more complex. Police scrutiny escalates. MI5 gets involved. Motives multiply. Everyone is lying to someone, often themselves. And just when you think you understand the shape of the story, Steal pulls back another layer and reminds you that nothing about this world is as straightforward as it pretends to be.
That escalating complexity is both Steal’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness.
Nikias, who also writes crime fiction under the name Ray Celestin, clearly understands how to construct an intricate thriller. The series is obsessed with systems: financial systems, government systems, ethical systems, and the way individuals are crushed inside them. Every revelation reframes what came before it, and the script is packed with the kind of twists that make you rewind just to confirm you didn’t miss something important.
Sometimes that density is exhilarating. Other times, it’s exhausting.
There were moments, particularly toward the back half of the series, where I genuinely felt like I needed a corkboard and a fistful of red string to keep track of who was manipulating whom and why. The show even lampshades this through Zara herself, who repeatedly notes that there’s always another bloody layer to uncover. It’s funny, but it’s also a warning. Steal is not interested in being simple, and that ambition occasionally tips into convolution for its own sake.
Still, the show never loses sight of its emotional anchor, and that anchor is Zara.
Turner’s performance here is the real heist. If you’ve primarily known her as Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones or as Jean Grey in the X-Men films, Steal feels like a conscious pivot. Zara is not regal. She’s not destined for greatness. She’s tired, cynical, and stuck in a job that has slowly eroded her sense of purpose. Turner plays her as someone who has already given up on the idea that work should mean anything, which makes her transformation over the course of the series quietly compelling.
What I appreciated most is that Zara doesn’t suddenly become a supergenius mastermind overnight. Her intelligence has always been there. The system just never rewarded it. When she’s forced to engage, forced to think laterally to survive, you see how sharp she actually is. Turner captures that shift beautifully, letting Zara’s confidence grow in small, believable increments rather than grand heroic leaps.
Crucially, Steal never insults its protagonist for the sake of suspense. Zara isn’t constantly making stupid decisions to keep the plot moving. More often than not, she’s already thought through the obvious angles and is operating three steps ahead of the people trying to control her. That makes watching her navigate the conspiracy genuinely satisfying. I was rooting for her not because she’s flawless, but because she learns, adapts, and refuses to be boxed in.
Where the series struggles is in giving its supporting cast the same level of dimensionality.
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd’s DCI Rhys Covac is serviceable but undercooked. He’s written as the classic obsessive detective, nose to the grindstone, personal life fraying at the edges, but his gambling debt subplot never quite justifies the screen time it consumes. There’s a potential romantic tension between Rhys and Zara that could have added emotional texture, but it’s introduced too late and explored too lightly to carry much weight. Compared to the moral and psychological complexity swirling around Zara, Rhys often feels like he wandered in from a more conventional crime drama.
Archie Madekwe’s Luke fares even worse. The character is meant to be Zara’s closest ally, but he’s written with so little charm or interiority that it’s hard to understand why she keeps him around. When the story asks us to care deeply about Luke’s fate, the emotional groundwork simply isn’t there. Madekwe does what he can, but the script leaves him stranded, and the result is a character who feels more like a plot device than a person.
This imbalance is especially noticeable because Steal introduces a lot of players. Financial executives, intelligence operatives, shadowy power brokers, and ideological antagonists all cycle through the narrative, but very few of them leave a lasting impression. By the end of the series, Zara and, to a lesser extent, Rhys are the only characters who feel fully realized. In a story this crowded, that’s a missed opportunity.
Structurally, Steal is a slow burn that eventually ignites into something far more propulsive. The first few episodes spend a lot of time assembling the puzzle pieces, establishing tone, and layering in thematic concerns about money, ethics, and responsibility. It’s deliberate to a fault, but once Episode 4 hits, the pacing snaps into focus. From that point on, every episode ends with a revelation designed to make you immediately queue up the next one.
The problem is the destination.
By the time the mastermind behind the conspiracy is revealed, Steal leans heavily into its ideological messaging. The critique of wealth hoarding, financial exploitation, and institutional hypocrisy is not subtle, and while I agree with much of what the show is saying, the execution veers into preachiness. The final explanation of the grand plan stretches plausibility just far enough that it threatens to undercut the grounded realism the series worked so hard to establish.
And yet, even as I recognized those flaws, I was still engaged. Still invested. Still curious to see how Zara would navigate the fallout.
That’s the paradox of Steal. It’s a show that sometimes trips over its own ambition, but its ambition is also what makes it worth watching. It wants to be smarter than the average thriller. It wants to say something about the world we live in. It doesn’t always balance those goals perfectly, but the attempt itself is refreshing.
By the time the credits rolled on the final episode, I wasn’t blown away, but I was satisfied. Steal may not stick the landing with the precision of a classic heist film, but the journey getting there is tense, stylish, and consistently watchable. For fans of conspiracy thrillers, morally ambiguous protagonists, and slow-burn mysteries that reward attention, this is an easy recommendation.
