Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Leopard Skin’ On Peacock, A Disjointed Drama About A Gang Of Jewel Thieves Taking People Hostage In A Remote Estate

Leopard Skin is one of those shows that sounds great on paper. Carla Gugino? Jeffrey Dean Morgan? Sign us up! Then we see that the producer is Sebastian Gutierrez, whose last effort with Gugino, his longtime girlfriend, was the annoying Cinemax show Jett. With their new collaboration Leopard Skin, we’re either going to be in for a fun, crazy ride, or we’re going to be spending time scratching our heads. Which one will it be?

LEOPARD SKIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Sparkling sunshine and wispy clouds. We see a naked woman swimming in her pool on a grand tropical estate.

The Gist: Playa Perdida, Mexico. Alba Fontana (Carla Gugino) lives at the sprawling estate, which belonged to her late former husband, millionaire playboy Archibaldo de la Colmena. She shares the remote mansion, where there’s no cell service and the landline goes out on a regular basis, with Batty (Gaite Jansen), who at the moment is cleaning the place in anticipation of a dinner party. But she’s not the housekeeper; the previous housekeeper, Inocencia (Ana de la Reguera), was dismissed under mysterious circumstances. No, Batty is Archibaldo’s widow; he married her after divorcing Alba.

As she’s getting ready, though, someone dressed in a paramedic’s uniform comes to the door, but she’s holding a gun. Turns out it’s a team of jewel thieves who need to hold up somewhere while one of the team members recovers from a gunshot wound. We meet this team hours earlier: Malone (Gentry White), Sierra (Nora Arnezeder) and Clover (Margot Bingham). They’re all experienced in their various specialties, but never worked together before. They get the jewels, but something goes wrong when they’re stopped at a checkpoint; the wheelman, Clover, takes off, which is when she got shot.

Despite their warnings, the dinner guests come anyway: Arrogant filmmaker Max (Philip Winchester) and his flibbertigibbet girlfriend Maru (Amelia Eve). In a letter to her mom, she makes Max out to be a great guy who loves her quirks, but in reality Max is a giant asshole. He wants to make a film about Archibaldo, which flummoxes Alba, as she thinks he did nothing worth documenting.

Sierra and Clover hide, but Malone poses as the butler; he’s less accommodating the next morning, though, when a hungover Maru wakes up at Alba and Batty’s house, Max having left her there to tend to a late-night “business meeting” that the drunken Maru was sure was with a cartel type. The trio has other things to worry about though: Alba and Batty have escaped.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Leopard Skin is a really strange show; it’s got elements of The White Lotus, Lost, a mockumentary series, and other genres.

Our Take: Created by Sebastian Gutierrez, Leopard Skin absolutely feels disjointed, careening from story element to story element without much in the way of connective tissue. The half-hour episodes only push the story forward so much before hitting reverse and showing things like Inocencia sucking on a lime while Max interviews her for the documentary on her old boss, before the action picks up again.

What we learn in the second episode is that the three members of the jewel heist team are all sent there by a corrupt Miami judge, Ray Lasalle (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who is having affairs with all three and tells them that there is only room for one of them on the plane coming out of Mexico. On the job, they all wear underwear he’s gifted to each of them, something that Malone figures out by the end of the first episode.

But there seems to be a lot more going on, but the threads are so tangled, the timelines so jumbled, that it takes to much mental energy to keep track. It doesn’t help that the acting is uneven; for every pro like Gugino or Morgan who can take any material and make it believable, there are others who seem to recite their lines like they’re still looking at the script. We lost count of how many times Sierra and Malone pointed guns at someone and threatened to kill them if they didn’t listen to what they wanted. The funny thing is, even under that threat, no one in the house seems to follow their orders at all.

The show definitely has an irreverent tone, but it’s not necessarily funny. It doesn’t need to be, but the tone sometimes gets in the way of giving us insight into a character or situation. If Leopard Skin is supposed to mimic a dream, it’s a dream that we’d likely forget about as soon as we woke up.

Sex and Skin: There’s lots of naked butts, and some vaguely-defined sex scenes in the first two episodes.

Parting Shot: Malone asks to see Clover’s underwear. She reluctantly shows it to him, confirming to him that they were all hired by the same guy.

Sleeper Star: Amelia Eve is quite good as Max’s flighty girlfriend Maru. She’s good at doing things like drunkenly dancing on a bar, and is very sexy while doing it.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Malone asks Batty whose house they’re in, she goes “Mine, I guess?” Since we don’t know a ton about why Alba and Batty are in this house together, that vague line is even more annoying.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Leopard Skin is too twisted and tangled to devote mental energy too. Add to that some uneven performances, and you’ve got the formula for an ambitious show that just misses the mark.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.