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Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play an occasionally thrilling game of cat-and-mouse in Apple's 12 12 12

The eight-episode series introduces some new tricks to the onscreen high-stakes heist repertoire.

By Matt Webb Mitovich  |  November 12, 2026 | 3:00am
Anthony Mackie in 12 12 12 (Photo: Apple TV)
TV Reviews Anthony Mackie
Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play an occasionally thrilling game of cat-and-mouse in Apple's 12 12 12

How Hollywood loves a heist—the best of which task a crew of disparate and distinctly skilled individuals with defeating uncrackable security measures in the name of absconding with abundant booty. The Sting, with its pair of con men conspiring to fleece a formidable mark, remains hugely rewatchable due the intricacy of the caper at hand. Ditto the likes of The Usual Suspects, Ocean’s Eleven, and Inside Man. With the advent of streaming and the looser rules it lives by, TV saw and seized the opportunity to take such grand thefts to the next level. Because if you can uncork a twist or two over the course of a film’s two-hour running time, imagine the opportunity presented by an eight-episode season. There’s also the freedom to really run the gamut with gimmicks—and Apple TV’s 12 12 12 knows it.

That title refers not to a date, but the show’s conceit. We are informed at the top of every episode that, per the FBI’s Principles Of Crime, a high-asset robbery takes 12 months to plan, and then 12 hours to execute. If the bandits get away with the goods, law enforcement typically has 12 days to catch them, else they not be caught at all. That “12, 12, and 12” framework is embodied here by three timelines—titled The Planning, The Heist, and The Takedown—that the series slickly toggles between each episode, 24-style.

Hailing from co-creators Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble (whose previous collaborations include the UK’s Silent Witness and Wild Bill), 12 12 12 stars Anthony Mackie as Jack Strickland, an FBI agent who a little over a year prior was professionally burned by a Newark, NJ heist-gone-wrong where a fellow agent lost her life. Jack is now very (and perhaps overly?) determined to exact revenge by thwarting the Newark crew’s next and far more ambitious plan: to steal 800,000 Swiss francs that a Russian crime ring has stashed inside the safe deposit vault of a Zurich bank. 

Paul Galvin (Jamie Dornan) is the Moby Dick to Strickland’s Ahab. After the Newark job, Paul, like many a master thief before him, thought he was out, but exigent circumstances compel him to press pause on quiet domesticity with lady love Severine (Agathe Rousselle) and their newborn and pull off this One Last Score. The trusty heist standbys pile high from there: We see Paul recruit a crew for this job, pulling from proven but also unexpected talent pools. Kali Reis, Julius Feldmeier, and Hildegard Schroedter are standouts (as, respectively, a train engineer, a safecracker who can contort himself into cramped spaces, and a disgruntled security guard), while Jack Kesy plays Bobby Galvin, a.k.a. The Hot-Headed Brother Who At Any Given Moment Might Blow Things With His Bravado.

Jai Courtney played a near-identical loose cannon in Netflix’s Kaleidoscope. And whereas that decades-spanning heist drama’s gimmick—the episodes leading up to its finale could be viewed in any order—didn’t really offer much value, 12 12 12 and its trio of timelines pay dramatic dividends. How so? The series occasionally uses one timeline to subvert assumptions arrived at in another. For example, things may appear to be going precisely as expected during The Heist, but we learn during The Planning of entirely unforeseen obstacles that needed to be overcome in the months prior. Or, Jack’s approach to The Takedown is given brand-new context by the later hours of The Heist. Also making things interesting is how master thief Paul gets a “hero” moment or two, while Jack’s tactics at times can read as pretty villainous.

With Kari Skogland (The Handmaid’s Tale) directing half of the episodes including the pilot, and Takeshi Fukunaga (Tokyo Vice) and Ellen Kuras helming two each, 12 12 12 packs a perfect amount of cinematic flair. The Heist, which is largely confined to the vault and the tunnel being oh-so-slowly bored to breach it, is effectively claustrophobic and in turn nerve-wracking. The Takedown, meanwhile, starts off in a romantically frosted, Christmastime Zurich, before whisking all involved to a vast, bone-chilling tundra, for the first of multiple showdowns. The flashbacks that are practically a requisite of a streaming series are thankfully sparse here—hey, we already have three timelines to track—and do little to inform any backstory.

As a tainted G-man chasing a personal and thus suspect agenda, Mackie commands the screen best when Jack is loudly clashing with colleagues including his derisive supervisor (Patrick Fabian), or sharing quieter moments opposite the female leads. Dornan (who like Mackie is also an executive producer on the project) and Kesy make for convincing, oft-sparring siblings; in any given scene they share, you never know when the tension will explosively erupt and potentially endanger all. Reis (of True Detective: Night Country) successfully conveys a similar volatility, while Sallie Harmsen—as the perfectly sassy Swiss cop assisting Jack in The Takedown—is, sadly, not given enough to do.

In the pantheon of extra-ambitious small-screen capers, 12 12 12 improves on the aforementioned Kaleidoscope and rivals both the U.K.’s Hatton Garden and The Great Train Robbery, but falls well shy of the highs achieved by Netflix’s Money Heist. The way 12 12 12 keeps you guessing to the very end mostly works, and mostly quite well, though the final episode or so is disappointingly messy. It’s another Apple thriller, like The Last Frontier, that’s not entirely sure how to bring things to a satisfying close. Come for the Mackie-vs.-Dornan dynamic—they share more scenes than you might think—and then stay for the entertaining trickle of twists along the way.

12 12 12 premieres November 13 on Apple TV.

 
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