Matthew Law plays a detective who cannot let a case die, even if it costs him everything. In the Netflix drama Nemesis, Law’s Isaiah Stiles of the LAPD is sleeping in the summer house, cut off from his teenage son and his wife, Candace, as he pursues the man he believes is responsible for a string of Los Angeles robberies and an old killing that still haunts him.
The hook is simple and brutal. Years earlier, a junior colleague was killed while chasing a gang of elite thieves. In the present, a robbery at a posh Los Angeles party sent bags of cash out the door from a high-stakes poker game, and Isaiah concludes that the same man is behind that heist and a later jewellery raid. The review says the show gets under way in two episodes and then starts to pile on betrayals, unexpected alliances, switched loyalties and higher stakes until it becomes, in the words of the reviewer, a battle of wits between alpha males with similar drives but different moral codes.
That is where Coltrane Wilder comes in. Played by Y’lan Noel, he is presented as an esteemed pillar of the Black business community, which only sharpens the suspicion around him. Isaiah is convinced Wilder is the man he wants, but the review makes clear the case is not that clean. There is a mole inside the LAPD, and Isaiah risks losing his gun and badge if he keeps pressing Coltrane’s guilt without hard evidence. The personal cost lands even harder because his father, Amos, played by Moe Irvin, is a convicted gangster, turning the story into a family collision as much as a police investigation.
That tension is what keeps Nemesis moving. The review frames it as the first Netflix show from writer Courtney A. Kemp, the creator of Power and its spin-offs, and says it begins with familiar crime-drama pieces before breaking them apart and rearranging them into something more elaborate. By the end of the opening stretch, the question is not whether Isaiah wants justice. It is whether he can prove anything at all before the case strips him of his badge and leaves him with nothing but certainty.
’s verdict is that it only improves as it goes, and the review says the series “gets better and better by the minute” and then “proceeds to, in plot terms, go berserk.” For viewers, that means the first two episodes do the job of setting the board; what follows is the real game, with LAPD politics, organized crime and one fractured family all closing in on the same fight.
