[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Company You Keep series premiere.]
Why can’t Charlie (Milo Ventimiglia) and Emma (Catherine Haena Kim), whose sparks take them from a hotel bar to his penthouse suite back to the bar and to the pool (for 36 hours that do eventually include sex), just stay where they are, doing what they are, being together, indefinitely? Because, as she puts it at one point to him during The Company You Keep, “fantasy is one thing, reality’s another.”
These are two people who slip in the truth — “I’m a criminal,” he says, and she replies, “I’m CIA” — amidst their initial flirtation at the bar, each coming up with wild backstories for themselves. So far, those important details don’t play too big of a role but it’s only a matter of time. Instead, the premiere is about them getting to know each other and introducing their lives apart with the tease of her soon getting on his trail as a con man.
They cross paths at a hotel bar after both run into some bad luck with love — his fiancée Tina (Bridget Regan) makes off with the family’s score, her boyfriend’s been cheating on her for months and asks “can you honestly say you’re in love with me?” — and find they not only enjoy each other’s company but also have quite a bit else in common: They lie to their partners, each other, and themselves and get each other when it comes to their families (the basics, at least). Oh, and they definitely have chemistry. But a day (and some) in a hotel bed, bathtub, and pool does not a relationship make (yet) and both have reality to get back to.
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In fact, it’s while both are busy with other aspects of their lives — he and his family on a con, she out with hers — that they cross paths again, this time at a gala. They dance, but they also, again, lie. He’s not truthful about why he’s there, while when she has to leave, it’s for a work thing. Still, they are honest about how they feel about their families. For him, who he is is so wrapped up in who they are it’s hard for him to see past it sometimes. Meanwhile, she’s been defining herself against her family her entire life.
But what Emma doesn’t know is that Charlie’s sister Birdie (Sarah Wayne Callies) sees them together and confronts him when she steps away for a call. After what happened with Tina, Birdie warns him not to let her down again. And so when Emma returns to him, Charlie turns down her offer to make plans, repeating here line about fantasy and reality from their time together. She asks if he can honestly say he didn’t think about her and doesn’t think something’s there, and he says he didn’t (a lie, he was distracted at one point by photos of her on his phone) and he doesn’t before walking away.
Later, after the job is done, when Birdie brings up the girl in front of their parents, Charlie shrugs it off. “This is what I’m good at,” he says. But Leo (William Fichtner) and Fran (Polly Draper) refuse to let him think that way. Rather than retiring as they’d planned while he sticks around to fall on the sword for the family — “It’s our fault you went inside, had to survive that hell. We’re in this spot today because of our choices, not yours.” — they’re all in or all out. Because, as Fran tells her son, this can’t be his whole world.
ABC/Eric McCandless
And maybe it won’t. Charlie then goes to see Emma (who brushes off his question about injuries she sustained on the job) and tells her, “my life, my family, it’s complicated. The more you know about me, the faster you’ll want to run.” But he does want to take her on that date and admits he lied the night before and there is something between them. She kisses him. But as much as they’d prefer to live the lies, we know that can’t last.
The premiere also introduces a major foe of both Charlie and his family and Emma and the CIA: an Irish crime syndicate, specifically Patrick Maguire (Timothy V. Murphy) and Daphne (Felisha Terrell). Charlie and his family try to con Patrick with the sale of a warehouse; they pose as FBI and clear the syndicate out, but then Tina makes off with the money, leaving behind her engagement ring. “You don’t know what comes next” indeed, as she tells Charlie about their supposed happily ever after they’d had planned.
To make up for what they lost, Charlie looks for a score and sets his eye on a pastor guilty of money laundering. All it takes is a bit of undercover work, a fake mugging, and duping the pastor into giving them a briefcase with his money, and the con is successful … or so they think.
Meanwhile, Emma’s been tracking a drug trafficking ring in Europe about to make a push into the U.S., and that leads her to Maguire — and a photo of his meet with Charlie (unidentifiable, his back to the camera). In a joint operation, the FBI is too eager to get Maguire as he’s boarding a plane, so Daphne gets away, with Emma getting hurt in her attempt to pursue. But it’s Emma who gets the intel on Daphne: She grew up with a single mother and has a law degree, with Maguire bringing her in as a consultant. She’s the brains behind the operation, meaning arresting Maguire doesn’t change anything.
Emma’s right, because Daphne goes to Charlie to demand the money he (Tina) stole ($10 million, plus an addition $5 million, for the cost of getting Maguire out of prison). How does he know that she won’t take the money then take care of them? “That’s the problem with lying for a living: You never really know who you can trust, do you?” she points out. Getting that kind of money will take time, but Daphne advises Charlie to get to what he does best: stealing because he’s not going to be able to lie his way out of this one.
So what did you think of The Company You Keep and Charlie and Emma’s chemistry? Let us know in the poll below.
The Company You Keep, Sundays, 10/9c, ABC