Kudos to Milo Ventimiglia for easily switching gears from angst-ridden Jack Pearson to con artist Charlie Nicoletti in his latest ABC romantic dramedy “The Company You Keep.”
The series, premiering Feb. 19 at 10 p.m., frees Ventimiglia to unbuckle Jack’s suffocating, overwrought “This Is Us” straitjacket and breathe — and he exhales with an easygoing, charming performance (sans the bad Jack Pearson mustache) in a series pulsating with a “Moonlighting”-type vibe, albeit with a radically different plotline.
Here’s the setup: Charlie Nicoletti and his family — mom Fran (Polly Draper), dad Leo (William Fichtner) and large sister Birdie (Sarah Wayne Callies) — own a bar in Baltimore and lead double-lives as criminals pulling off high-end heists (certainly one of which landed Charlie within the slammer). They work along with guile, high-tech equipment, disguises, alter-egos — the works — but their latest scam, stealing $10 million from an Irish crime syndicate, goes awry when Charlie’s ostensible fiancee grabs the money for herself and vanishes and not using a trace. Call it the Big Kiss-off.
Charlie goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and meets Emma Hill (Catherine Haena Kim), an undercover CIA agent posing as a knowledge analyst at a “logistics firm.” She, too, is within the throes of a romance gone sour after dumping her cheating boyfriend. Charlie tells Emma he’s a yoga instructor; she tells him she’s an ex-beauty pageant contestant-turned-NASA rocket scientist. Like that. They get drunk, spend the night together (chastely) and discover they’ve feelings for one another despite that one small glitch about their real identities.
Enter Daphne Finch (Felisha Terrell), the Irish syndicate’s Ivy League-educated “consultant” who shows up on the Nicolettis’ bar demanding they fork over $15 million to free her boss from prison … or else. The icing on the cake? Emma is working with the FBI to bring down that very same syndicate (which brokers in fentanyl) — organising an unwitting cat-and-mouse game between she and Charlie as their alter-egos romance takes a turn for the hot-and-heavier.
That’s all within the series opener. In Episode 2 — featuring one other heist, more footsie between Emma and Charlie and more threats from Daphne — we learn a bit more about everyone, including one surprising revelation concerning a predominant character. Once the exposition is out of the way in which, “The Company You Keep” glides along at a nice, breezy pace, and also you’ll end up rooting for Charlie and Emma to make a go of it despite, well, all the pieces else. There’s nice on-screen chemistry between Ventimiglia and the Queens-born Kim (“Ballers,” “FBI,” “Good Trouble”), and solid support from a superb forged of seasoned TV pros in Draper (“thirtysomething”), Fichtner (“Mom”) and Callies (“The Walking Dead”), who, like Fitchner, co-starred on Fox’s “Prison Break.”
“The Company You Keep” is the style of nice, late-season diversion that doesn’t take itself too seriously, mixing motion with a touch of caprice. It should make a solid addition to ABC’s Sunday-night lineup.
