Hap and Leonard: a poignant peak TV underdog that's no bromance

It is Christmas Eve 1989 in east Texas. Michael K Williams – still probably best known as fearless stick-up artist Omar in The Wire – is wearing a bright-red stetson with white-fur trim, pouring gasoline down the chimney of a crack den while chuckling “ho ho ho”. This is Leonard, a fiercely out and proud Vietnam veteran with a quick temper and zero tolerance for bad neighbours. His best friend, Hap – a rumpled would-be casanova played by James Purefoy with a commendable Texan twang – pulls up nearby to see the house ablaze. An agitated drug dealer runs out with his hair on fire. Hap shakes his head and mutters: “Not again …”

And so, with impressive economy and some festive wit, season three of frazzled thriller Hap and Leonard – subtitled The Two-Bear Mambo after the Joe R Lansdale novel it adapts – reintroduces its central duo and underlines their fractious relationship. The show’s 1980s period setting means thankfully no-one on-screen has ever referred to their friendship as a bromance. But in just a handful of concise seasons, Hap and Leonard have evolved into a poignant underdog odd couple, their constant bickering disguising a bulletproof sense of loyalty. That easygoing bond has proven invaluable as the pair have been dragged through various disreputable schemes.

In season one, it was a risky reclamation of hidden loot complicated by Hap’s ex-wife (played by Christina Hendricks), some unreliable co-conspirators and a thrill-killing couple. In season two, the goal was survival rather than profit: the pair had to stay one step ahead of the law while investigating a series of covered-up murders, seeking justice for the marginalised. At first, season three seems pitched as an against-the-clock rescue mission. Hap and Leonard head for the notoriously racist Grovetown (“a two-hour ride and a hundred years away,” is how one character describes it) to locate and retrieve their missing friend Florida (Tiffany Mack), the young black crusading lawyer who brought some invaluable brainpower to their legal kerfuffles in season two. As usual, things rapidly unravel.

Though fuelled by the search for Florida, the Two-Bear Mambo is scattergun enough to involve the last recording by a legendary local bluesman who supposedly sold his soul to the devil and much of the Grovetown story being revealed in flashback by a badly battered Hap and Leonard. With a novel’s worth of plot to cram into just six episodes, you might expect the show to feel rushed or overstuffed. Instead, what has been always been striking about Hap and Leonard has been how much space is set aside for downtime between the more pulpy thrills. Season three’s Two-Bear Mambo subtitle comes from Hap, Leonard and their semi-barbecued crack-dealing neighbours calmly absorbing a nature documentary while cooling their heels in jail; an essentially throwaway scene, but a weirdly memorable one.

The mix of the cartoonish and contentious may not be for everyone. In Klan-controlled Grovetown, burning crosses and the aftermath of a lynching are juxtaposed with a belligerent local police chief – played by LA Law’s Corbin Bernsen – with a visibly swollen testicle “about to blow up like Hiroshima”, which must have been a challenging day for the wardrobe department. In the tradition of pulp heroes, easygoing Hap and the more tightly-wound Leonard can usually handle themselves in a scrap, duking it out with rednecks and confidently racking pump-action shotguns. But when they are stranded on the outskirts of town, there is also the surprisingly sweet sight of them commandeering a tandem bicycle to ride back into the action.

Lansdale’s long-running series of Hap and Leonard novels are often compared to the work of Elmore Leonard: both specialise in small-time crime tales featuring vivid, larger-than-life personalities. If you miss the laidback gunslinging of Justified, the plotting switchbacks of Fargo or even the two-fisted ultraviolence of Banshee, Hap and Leonard provides a similar rural-noir hit in appealingly short seasons you can watch in a weekend without too much fuss.

That makes it even more frustrating that it can be so easy to miss and hard to track down: season three launched recently on Amazon Prime in the UK with little fanfare, while the second-run terrestrial rights are with the rarely-trumpeted BT-exclusive AMC UK channel. Being perennial underdogs does, of course, chime with the characters and their shambolic chivalry, but after three seasons of getting worked over by both life and various bad dudes, it feels like Hap and Leonard deserve a win.

Hap and Leonard: The Two-Bear Mambo continues Wednesday nights on SundanceTV in the US; episodes arrive on Amazon Prime within 24 hours in the UK