Netflix’s new drama Nemesis opens with a clean hit and keeps tightening the screws. In two episodes, the series introduces Detective Isaiah Stiles, played by Matthew Law, as he chases a string of Los Angeles robberies that begin with a poker heist at a posh party and lead to a jewellery raid tied to the same crew.
Stiles works for the LAPD, but the job is already costing him everything at home. He has alienated his teenage son, infuriated his wife, Candace, played by Gabrielle Dennis, and is sleeping in the summer house. The review’s bottom line is that the show gets its central plot up and running quickly and then builds out from there, with the kind of momentum that makes a crime series easy to keep watching.
The reason Stiles cannot let the case go is personal. He has been carrying trauma from an older investigation in which a junior colleague was killed while pursuing a gang of elite thieves, and he now believes a man he has chased for years is behind the new wave of robberies. That man is Coltrane Wilder, played by Y’lan Noel, an esteemed pillar of the Black business community whose public standing sits in sharp contrast to the suspicion hanging over him.
That suspicion comes with a professional cost. If Stiles pushes too hard on Wilder without hard evidence, he risks losing his gun and badge. The review also says the series eventually becomes more elaborate, revealing a big boss behind Wilder’s crimes who is also his sister-in-law, along with a mole inside the LAPD. Those twists give Nemesis a second layer beyond the opening heists and the detective work that follows them.
There is a family angle built into the pressure as well. Isaiah Stiles is also connected to Amos Stiles, a convicted gangster played by Moe Irvin, which helps explain why the show does not settle for a simple cop-versus-criminal setup. The series uses familiar crime-drama parts — a maverick detective, a suspected kingpin and a hidden betrayer inside the police department — but the arrangement keeps shifting as the story widens.
Nemesis matters for another reason: it is the first Netflix show from writer Courtney A Kemp, the creator of Power and its spin-offs. That matters because Kemp built a reputation for making crime stories feel broad, serialized and full of competing loyalties, and this new series appears to be leaning into the same strengths rather than trying to reinvent them. The show’s title may be new, but the engine behind it is familiar and proven.
The question now is not whether Nemesis has a hook. It does. The real test is whether its expanding web of family ties, police corruption and high-end theft can stay as sharp as those first two episodes. If the early pace holds, Netflix has another crime drama built to keep the audience inside the case long after the first arrest is supposed to end it.
