There’s something weirdly satisfying about seeing an elaborate lie slowly lock into place. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone parallel park perfectly on the first try. I’m not talking about a heist movie where everyone is impossibly cool, and the plan folds in like origami, but the messier version where someone is improvising under pressure, stacking one lie on top of the other, keeping track of five different stories they’ve told to five different people, and then pulling it off by the skin of their teeth, blowing your minds in the process.

You’ll relate to me only if you’ve watched Sneaky Pete, because I have not found another show on Prime Video that scratches the same itch. I watched the first season in roughly two sittings, spent an embarrassing amount of time afterward trying to learn to roll a coin across my knuckles the way Marius does, failed, and then went back to start Season 2. Sneaky Pete ran for three seasons between 2017 and 2019, co-created by Bryan Cranston and David Shore (House M.D.), and if you missed it during its initial run, here is why you should fix that this weekend.

‘Sneaky Pete’ Scratches the Same Itch as ‘The Sopranos’

The easiest sell is always the obvious one – at least that’s how I’ve always seen television operate. Both Sneaky Pete and The Sopranos are fundamentally about a man who lives two lives simultaneously, and both find most of their dramatic tension in watching that balance get harder to maintain. Tony Soprano goes to therapy and has to carefully manage what he says, so his therapist does not figure out he runs a crime family. Marius Josipovic, the con artist at the center of Sneaky Pete, gets out of prison and immediately assumes the identity of his cellmate, Pete, to hide from a mob boss he owes money to. Then, he has to keep the con going when Pete’s family, whom he knows nothing about, starts treating him like a returning son.

The Sopranos built its entire lore around the first episode, which showcases the exhaustion of Tony’s double life. It’s not exciting; it is a weight he carries into every room, including his therapist’s office, including his daughter’s school play, and including Sunday dinner. Sneaky Pete does the same thing with Marius and the Bernhardt family. They have a bail bond operation run out of a small Connecticut town by a grandmother, Audrey, played by Margo Martindale, with barely-contained authority. Marius comes in expecting to run a quick con and get out. Instead, he finds a family with their own tangled problems, their secrets, their grey-area relationships with the law.

Sneaky Pete intelligently borrows The Sopranos’ trick of using funny people to land its dark material. “Pine Barrens,” the episode where Paulie and Christopher get lost in the woods after a botched hit, is legit one of the funniest hours of TV I have ever watched, and it sits inside a show where people die regularly and brutally. Sneaky Pete has the same tonal fluency. The very absurd Bernhardts and their illegal bail bonds business is a great example. Watching Marius try to navigate their chaos while keeping his own cover intact generates real comedy, and then the show will pivot on a dime and remind you that the mob boss he is running from (played by Cranston) is no joke.

‘Sneaky Pete’ Does One Thing Better Than Most Crime Shows

The show started life as a CBS pilot that the network passed on, and you can just feel how much better it became when Amazon picked it up and freed it from network constraints. There’s no procedural pressure or case-of-the-week format and no mandatory reset button at the end of every episode. Stories carry across episodes and seasons, and Sneaky Pete uses that freedom to let its characters behave unpredictably.

I also think it gets undersold what Giovanni Ribisi is doing with his character, Marius. Con-man characters in movies and TV shows tend to be played as effortlessly clever. Think Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven, always three steps ahead, never rattled. Ribisi plays Marius as someone who is smart but constantly trying to catch up, thinking fast and reading people and adjusting in real time because he has no other option. There is a scene early in Season 1 where he gets caught in a small lie by Audrey and has to immediately weave it into a larger, more convincing lie, and Ribisi’s face in that moment – that fraction of a second where you see him recalibrate – alone is Emmy-worthy.

The Sopranos shaped a generation of crime television, and most of what it inspired tried too hard to replicate the scope and the tragedy. Sneaky Pete is smarter than that because it takes the tone, the dark humor, the double-life trope, and builds something that’s palatable and fun.

All three seasons of Sneaky Pete are available now on Prime Video.