Courtney A. Kemp built the Power universe into one of the most successful franchises in cable television history. Then she signed a major overall deal with Netflix in 2021 and spent four years building something new. That something is Nemesis, and it just hit number one.
Nemesis premiered on Netflix on May 14 and stormed straight to the top of the streamer’s TV rankings within days of its debut. All eight episodes of Season 1 dropped simultaneously, and the audience response was immediate. The show currently holds a 90 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Kemp, who serves as showrunner and executive producer through her End of Episode banner, co-created the series alongside Tani Marole. The first two episodes were directed by Mario Van Peebles.
The premise follows a relentless LAPD detective who becomes obsessed with taking down the master thief behind a string of daring heists, and only one of them can come out on top. The series is set in Los Angeles, and Kemp has been explicit about the fact that she wanted to make a show that was unmistakably, unapologetically a Los Angeles story, shot in Los Angeles, employing Los Angeles crews.
Matthew Law plays Detective Isaiah Stiles, an LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division lieutenant who begins to suspect that a brazen Halloween heist is the opening move of something much larger. Y’lan Noel plays Coltrane Wilder, the criminal mastermind at the center of everything, a man who maintains the public face of a legitimate real estate businessman while leading a crew whose sophistication keeps putting him one step ahead of the law. Gabrielle Dennis plays Dr. Candice Stiles, Isaiah’s wife and a therapist, and Cleopatra Coleman plays Ebony Wilder, Coltrane’s wife and accomplice.
The cat-and-mouse dynamic between Stiles and Coltrane is the engine of the series, but Kemp described the show’s deeper architecture to Deadline as “marriage and mayhem”, the idea that the domestic lives of both men are as central to the storytelling as the heists and the chase. “It’s both things,” she said.
Nemesis is the first project delivered under Kemp’s Netflix deal. After six seasons and multiple spinoffs of Power at Starz, the expectation that she could replicate that audience on a different platform with a new property was a legitimate open question. The number one ranking answers it.
The show is not expected to remain a limited series. Kemp confirmed in a live Instagram broadcast that a Season 2 blueprint already exists, and told What’s on Netflix that the Los Angeles setting and the community of below-the-line workers who staffed the production are part of why more seasons matter beyond the creative argument.
“We really hope we have more seasons of this show so we can bring our amazing crew back,” she said. No formal renewal order from Netflix has been announced yet, but the trajectory makes it appear to be a matter of when rather than whether.
Nemesis is streaming now on Netflix. All eight episodes of Season 1 are available.
Photo Credit: Netflix
