The Last Panthers

9pm, Sky Atlantic

Sky produced one of the best crime sagas of recent years in Gomorrah, the Naples-set gangster opera, and it might just have done it again with The Last Panthers, a similarly simmering six-part serial that begins like a jewel robbery thriller, then spreads across Europe to become something quite different.

That opening diamond heist is arresting enough, though. The series begins on the streets of Marseilles, as three men dressed like decorators enter an exclusive-looking jewellers, pull guns, and, pausing only to stick a pistol in the manager’s face and douse her in a gallon of shocking pink paint, rob €15 million in gems.

It’s their escape that sets the show’s pulse racing: cops closing in, they scatter and sprint through streets and alleyways, a heart-pounding chase captured in a frenetic, Bourne-like choreography of figure, camera and urban geography. As they run, mistakes are made, shots are exchanged, and a six-year-old child dies in the crossfire.

At this point, just like those fleeing thieves, the plot splits in three directions. One strand follows Khalil (Tahar Rahim), a chippy young Marseilles detective determined to track down the child’s killers by tracing their weapons, a quest that will lead back to the crumbling projects in which he grew up. A second focuses on Naomi (Samantha Morton), an adjuster from the London firm responsible for insuring the diamonds, ordered to recover them at all costs. The third staggers through border after border with the robbers themselves, in particular Milan (Goran Bogdan), a reticent brooder whose soulful eyes belie a bloody past in which he earned the nickname “The Animal.”

It’s here things get interesting. Written by Jack Thorne, who has shifted up several gears from This Is England, The Last Panthers is based on the real-life example of the loose Balkan criminal network dubbed The Pink Panthers. Having amassed more than $300 million in audacious robberies, it is the most successful gang of jewel thieves of modern times.

But the Panther’s rise lies rooted in the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the waves of conflict, hatred, poverty and corruption that spread in the early 1990s. This swamp of a past forms the foundation into which the series begins to sink. “I don’t do the Balkan work,” Naomi mutters, when it becomes clear the diamond trail leads towards Serbia. As soon as she says it, you know both that she has a traumatic past in the region, and that she will end up there again.

For all the modernity of the filmmaking (made by Warp Films, the series has the spacey look and simmering electronic soundtrack that’s a house style for the company), Thorne’s script is happy to rely on old-fashioned fate and coincidence – Naomi and Milan have met before – but it has such ambitious scope you can forgive the contrivances.

Most arresting is the picture it paints of Europe, composed in muddy greys and browns, with the former Soviet states like a badly healed wound at its centre. For a title tune, the programme boasts a new song by David Bowie, a kind of doomy, neo-gothic Gregorian chant. At first, because of how the multi-lingual series shoots across the continent, you might reckon his pals Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express would have been more fitting. But Kraftwerk’s is an optimistic anthem, and the more you watch The Last Panthers, the more Bowie’s desolate, post-industrial plainsong seems perfect. This dim, perilous world looks like it could collapse back into the Dark Ages at any moment.