11 Best Heist Shows of All Time — Where Will ‘Lucky’ Rank?

A thief, a hitter, a hacker, a grifter, and a mastermind carry out heists for good causes in this popular TV drama. “Sometimes, bad guys make the best good guys,” explains Timothy Hutton’s Nate Ford. Is this show formulaic? Perhaps. But it’s also fiendishly fun.

This British drama wears its influences on its tailored sleeves: Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, and Mission: Impossible, for starters. And it carries on the tradition in entertaining fashion as it tracks the long cons of an elite team — and gives The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s Robert Vaughn a chance to go undercover again.

The newest entry on this list, Steal stars Sophie Turner as Zara, an employee of a pension management company that comes under attack by armed robbers. But who’s the real villain? Capitalism? Billionaires? Zara herself? Easy answers aren’t abundant in this heist drama.

Good Girls takes the heist genre down to the everyday level, depicting three down-on-their-lucky women who rob a local supermarket and set off a chain reaction of consequences. Though the show takes a comedic tack, but there’s ample drama: These desperate housewives could face prison time if their crimes catch up to them.

This French thriller goes from zero to 60, starting with the theft of a necklace that once graced the neck of Marie Antoinette from an auction at the Louvre. And because Omar Sy is so charismatic as Assane Diop — a modern-day version of the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin — we have choice but to cheer on the crafty criminal.

A global phenomenon and a winner of the International Emmy Awards’ Best Drama Series category, this Spanish drama has a team of highly-skilled thieves conspiring to rob the Royal Mint of Spain. With its shifting timelines and shifting agendas, Money Heist has viewers’ brains and hearts racing.

The late, great Andre Braugher led the cast of this heist miniseries. He played Nick Atwater, the leader of a thief group targeting $40 million in government money. But one of the individuals on their tail happens to be Nick’s daughter (played future Good Girls star Mae Whitman), who she sees more than he wants her to.

“Stealing it was just the start” is the tagline of this British drama about robbers stumbling across millions of dollars of gold bullion and then figuring out how to fence it without getting caught. The production is stylishly shot, captivatingly acted, and — best of all — based on the true story of the U.K.’s infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery.

It would be impossible to leave this seminal espionage TV drama, a 1960s classic that proliferated into a three-decade film series, off the list. The Emmy-winning series, inspired by the heist film Topkapi, features secret agents of the Impossible Mission Force carrying out intricate operations across the world. And like the burning fuse of the film’s iconic crest sequence, it’s a race against the clock.

Sure, this is a spy drama, but with CIA operative Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) using wigs, disguises, accents, false identities, and technology to abscond with intel, weapons, and assets, you’ve got all the markings of a heist saga. Sydney’s covert ops are thrilling and oft-unpredictable missions with sky-high stakes, and she’s always dressed (and armed) for the part.

Don’t think this Star Wars series qualifies as heist television? Did you sleep through the mission on Aldhani, wherein thief-turned-Rebel Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is tasked with stealing the quarterly payroll for an entire Imperial sector? An anti-fascist rallying cry of a sci-fi series — with heist action to boot — Andor has all of us ready to rebel.