It takes a while to realize that the hero of Peacock’s new crime drama Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist is in fact none of the flamboyant gangsters, villains and petty criminals of the series, but rather the city of Atlanta. And that the title heist, despite its stated financial value, is in reality one of prestige and worldwide recognition

Or maybe the hero of Battle Night is Kevin Hart’s Chicken Man, not because he’s a character with virtue or ingenuity, but because Chicken Man represents Atlanta: a fighter with big dreams who learns to overcome his seedy past by contemplating the wider world outside himself.

All credit goes to Shaye Ogbonna, who adapted the podcast of the same name, for creating a comedic thriller with the heart of an American Studies thesis. I am not being sarcastic! Battle Night has some real stuff in mind, plus a ridiculously deep and generally well-developed ensemble cast. These elements generally compensate for the numerous structural and tonal problems in an eight-hour running time that is padded out by at least two hours and struggles to maintain momentum.

It’s 1970, and Atlanta is a small town still struggling to shake off the shame of its Dixie roots. Chicken Man is an ex-con running a numbers game, with the help of his mistress and Girl Friday Vivian (Taraji P. Henson), who’s well aware that his business is about to be taken over by a state lottery. (Oddly enough, the same subplot plays out in Apple TV+’s Baltimore set Lady in the lake.)

Opportunity for Chicken Man and his hometown come together in a show that is, to quote, “based on some shit that really happened.”

Muhammad Ali (Dexter Darden, who captures the champion’s cadence but not his physical prowess) remains a polarizing figure for his opposition to the Vietnam War. He’s scheduled his first fight in three years in Atlanta, much to the chagrin of the Georgia governor, who’s pushing for segregation, and the local police. The event brings controversy to the area, and a sea of ​​African-American celebrities, who join Chicken Man’s dream of helping transform the city into a black Las Vegas (mostly for his own good, at first). When he hears that the country’s top black organized crime figures will be in town, he offers to throw a party in honor of Samuel L. Jackson’s infamous Frank Moten. Unbeknownst to Chicken Man, there was a party planned earlier, and earlier plans to rob it, and he’s about to make an easy scapegoat.

The robbery and the mounting body count complicate the life of Detective J.D. Hudson (Don Cheadle), who is recruited as one of the city’s first black police officers to protect Ali, despite his own ambivalent feelings about the boxer.

Soon, Chicken Man is on the front page of local newspapers as the ringleader of a crime he didn’t orchestrate, and godfathers from across the country—including Jersey’s Terrence Howard’s Cadillac—are trying to kill him. The real robbers realize that what seemed like a low-stakes, takedown and looting operation has also put a bounty on their heads. Who will be alive when the dust settles, and who will win the battle for Atlanta’s future?

One of the keys to both a good heist and a good heist story is precision, and Battle Night is a determinedly unwieldy thing. It has only enough story for a two-hour movie, but enough characters for a five-season cable drama, and the attempt to bridge that gap never quite flows. On top of the genre boilerplate and repetitive structural tweaks — starting with a pointless in medias res opening and featuring multiple “It was a plan all along!” flashback revelations — it’s a show that’s constantly introducing new people and then often has to reintroduce them.

When you have Jackson and Howard and Hart and Henson and Cheadle, the star power alone gives you extra time to eventually give their characters backstories. The A-listers are all given enough material to deliver performances that are either fully realized or at the very least incredibly fun.

This is probably Hart’s best semi-dramatic work to date, a mix of fast-talking humor and increasingly serious reflection wrapped in flared suits and a perpetually immaculate Afro. While there are points where Jackson feels like he’s leaning heavily on his old Tarantino playbook, only with far less flowery dialogue, he tears apart his slick, tough-guy demeanor with menacing ease. When it’s time for Jackson and Cheadle, arguably the story’s most complex character, to share the screen, it’s a total, if all-too-rare, pleasure. Henson preserves Vivian’s dignity even when the scripts fall back on hackneyed threats of sexual violence, and she finds a brutality that’s more vulnerable and less overtly comic than in her Emmy-nominated Empire play.

But the participants in the actual job are largely played by relative strangers, so the show tells us who they all are. Then there’s the heist, where the characters all wear masks, so it’s impossible to know who the people are we half-met in the previous episode. Then we learn who they are again in the next episode, and then they’re all spending time in an abandoned nightclub in a later episode and are reintroduced. While I started to recognize them and care about one or two of their adventures — there are seven or eight heists before bad things happen — each wave of new exposition resets the built-up tension and emotional investment to zero by the finale.

I can see why Ogbonna and company wanted to make sure these roles weren’t an afterthought. They’re the systematically oppressed pawns, whether they’re the tools of the overseas military-industrial complex or the mysterious powers that be who ordered the plan. It’s interesting to watch the writers try to decide whether they deserve specific sympathy — some of them are pretty bad guys — or just general human empathy. Plus, they’re all very well played, and there are standout moments for Melvin Gregg, Myles Bullock, Sam Adegoke, and more.

But just as you can sense the writers wanting to flesh out otherwise background characters — see also Artrece Johnson, excellent as Chicken Man’s wife Faye, and Teresa Celeste, pugnacious as the generally undefined Maxine — it’s just as easy to imagine editors and audiences itching to get back to gun-toting, swearing Samuel L. Jackson or Don Cheadle hanging out with Muhammad Ali.

Stars: They are a blessing and a curse.

It’s a lack of focus that also makes the tone waver. Wanting violence to swing back and forth between frivolous and meaningful requires a delicacy that Battle Night rarely possesses. An artist like Jackson can still hum empty curses, but empty violence and cheap tension built on the possibility of rape is exploitative in a story that can’t decide if that’s the direction it wants to go.

Craig Brewer, who directed the first two and last two chapters, knows how to tap into a grindhouse aesthetic. The opening credits are a true B-movie, complete with weathered film and the vintage NBC peacock logo. Brewer’s early episodes use split-screens and zooms to capture that late-’60s, early-’70s vibe, but much of the middle of the season is more visually unremarkable. It’s a reminder of how much easier it would have been for Battle Night to maintain consistency as a feature film or perhaps a six part series. There were several moments midway through the season where my attention waned.

That’s where the actors kept me watching. The show isn’t consistent, but the world the writers consistently capture gives stars and newcomers and character veterans — I don’t want to leave out the vibrant work of people like Rockmond Dunbar, Ron Reaco Lee and Michael James Shaw — a chance to shine.