Hustle (TV series)

Hustle
Title card from series 5 to series 8
Created by	Tony Jordan
Starring	Adrian Lester Robert Glenister Matt Di Angelo Kelly Adams Robert Vaughn Jaime Murray Marc Warren Rob Jarvis Ashley Walters
Theme music composer	Simon Rogers
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of series	8
No. of episodes	48 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Karen Wilson Howard Burch Tony Jordan Simon Crawford Collins
Running time	60 minutes ~52 minutes outside UK
Release
Original network	BBC One BBC HD (2007–2010) BBC One HD (2011–2012)
Picture format	16:9 576i (Series 1–4) 1080i (HD) (Series 5–8)
Original release	24 February 2004 (2004-02-24) – 17 February 2012 (2012-02-17)
Website

60 minutes

Hustle is a British television drama series made by Kudos Film and Television and broadcast on BBC One in the United Kingdom. Created by Tony Jordan and first broadcast in 2004, the series follows a group of con artists who specialise in "long cons"—extended deceptions which require greater commitment, but which return a higher reward than simple confidence tricks. The eighth and last series ended on 17 February 2012.

Hustle was largely born from the same production team that created and popularised the early series of Spooks, a similarly-styled drama series first broadcast in 2002.Bharat Nalluri, that series' Executive Director, conceived the idea in early 2002 while filming for the first Spooks series was ongoing. Nalluri pitched the concept to Jane Featherstone, Managing Director of Kudos Film & Television which was the production company behind Spooks, in the back of a taxi while returning from a day's filming. Intrigued by the idea, Featherstone recruited Tony Jordan, the lead scriptwriter of the soap opera EastEnders, to develop it into a workable proposal.

Jordan quickly produced some initial script drafts, which Featherstone took to the BBC; Gareth Neame, Head of Drama Commissioning, rapidly approved a six-part series. Featherstone assembled a production team that had considerable overlap with the Spooks crew, including Simon Crawford Collins as producer and Matthew Graham as co-writer. In creating the first episodes, Jordan drew inspiration from the long tradition of confidence tricks and heists in Hollywood and television, including The A-Team, The Sting and The Grifters (and in a similar vein, the films and tv series of Mission Impossible). Featherstone remarked that "Ocean's Eleven was on around the time Bharat and I first spoke, and I think it helped to inspire us, but really we took our inspiration from a whole catalogue of movies and books... we wanted to make something that had the energy, verve, style and pure entertainment value of those sorts of films" At the same time, the writers attempted to draw on the success of recent blockbusters such as Ocean's Eleven and Mission: Impossible; speaking in an interview in December 2003, Crawford explained that "[such shows] worked because of the interaction within the group – the plotlines were almost irrelevant".