A bank robber who stays free for twelve days is never caught. That rule is spoken in the trailer for 12 12 12, Apple TV’s new heist thriller series, in which Anthony Mackie plays a disgraced FBI agent and Jamie Dornan a career criminal. The whole show runs on it: one man is planning to rob a bank vault buried beneath the streets of Zurich, the other is trying to stop the clock before the rule protects the thief.

Created and written by Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble, the series splits every episode across three timelines: the months of planning, the hours of the robbery itself and the days of the hunt that follows. Mackie plays the agent, Dornan plays an American career criminal, and Apple’s own logline describes what happens between them as “a zero-sum game of cat and mouse across Europe.” Kari Skogland directed the pilot.

The title is the rulebook

The numbers in the title are not decoration. The trailer attributes the formula to “FBI principles of crime”: a high-asset robbery takes twelve months in planning and twelve hours in execution, and a robber who is not caught within twelve days “is not caught at all.” Apple’s trailer launch billed the job as “the biggest banking heist in the history of Europe.” Whether any real bureau manual says this matters less than what the show does with it. The rule turns a heist into three deadlines stacked on top of each other.

That structure is the series’ main bet. Most heist stories build toward the robbery and treat the aftermath as an epilogue. Here the aftermath is a third of the architecture. The planning year belongs to the thief, the twelve hours belong to the robbery, and the twelve days belong to the pursuer, who is the only person in the story working against a countdown he did not set. The setup points to a show where suspense comes less from whether the vault opens than from how each timeline changes what the viewer knows about the other two.

Telling a crime story out of order is not new on streaming. Netflix built Kaleidoscope around a heist whose episodes could be watched in different sequences, and Money Heist made the robbery itself a serialized event. What 12 12 12 adds, on paper, is a fixed formula that both sides know. The agent knows the thief has a finish line. The thief knows the agent knows. That shared knowledge is what separates a cat-and-mouse premise from a simple chase.

Mackie and Dornan, on opposite sides this time

The casting carries its own history. Mackie and Dornan played partners in Synchronic, the time-travel drama from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead in which they were two paramedics chasing a designer drug that moves its users through time. In 12 12 12 they are adversaries, and both also serve as executive producers, Mackie through his company Make It With Gravy.

Each actor arrives with a screen persona that the premise seems designed to use. Mackie spent years as Sam Wilson in Marvel’s films and in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a series directed entirely by Skogland, so the pilot reunites a director and a lead who already shared a long shoot. Dornan’s best-known television role is the opposite of a lawman: in the BBC series The Fall he played a killer hunted through Belfast by Gillian Anderson‘s detective. Casting him once more as the man being pursued, this time a thief rather than a murderer, reads as a deliberate inversion of that history rather than an accident.

Around them, Apple’s cast list includes Jack Kesy, Agathe Rousselle, Sallie Harmsen, José Garcia and Kali Reis, with Ólafur Darri Ólafsson also in the ensemble. Rousselle broke through in Julia Ducournau‘s Titane, and Reis, a former world boxing champion, co-led True Detective: Night Country. Apple has not detailed most of their roles yet, which means the supporting characters around the two leads remain the least known part of the series before launch.

Why Zurich, and why Europe

A vault beneath Zurich is a precise choice. The city is shorthand for private wealth kept out of sight, and a robbery there carries an extra question that a casino or a jewellery store job does not: whose money sits in that room, and who will admit to losing it. The logline does not say and Apple has not revealed more, but the location frames the heist as a raid on discretion as much as on cash.

The chase is continental. The pursuit runs “across Europe,” in Apple’s phrasing, which places 12 12 12 near Sky and Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal, another recent series about one professional tracking another across borders. Production stayed largely in Central Europe: cameras rolled in Budapest and in Sopron, a Hungarian town on the Austrian border, as well as in Austin, Texas.

A heist show with a corporate merger in its credits

The path to the screen is a small history of the streaming business. Apple picked the project up in May 2024, when it was a co-production between Anonymous Content and Skydance Television. After Skydance merged with Paramount Global in 2025, Paramount Television Studios took over production, so a series that began as an independent package now arrives on Apple TV as a Paramount-made show.

It also fits the shape of Apple’s adult genre slate, where Slow Horses and Hijack established that the service wants procedural tension with recognisable leads. A cop-versus-thief series with two established stars, a fixed episode count and a weekly rollout is that strategy in compact form: a defined event rather than an open-ended franchise, although nothing announced so far rules out more.

Quick answers

Is 12 12 12 based on a true story? Nothing in Apple’s materials presents it as one. It is an original series created by Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble, built around a fictional raid on a Zurich bank vault.

Who is in the cast? Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan lead, with Jack Kesy, Agathe Rousselle, Sallie Harmsen, José Garcia, Kali Reis and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson.

Where can I watch it? 12 12 12 is an Apple Original and streams exclusively on Apple TV.

How many episodes are there? Eight: two at launch, then one a week.

If the rule in the title holds, the twelfth day is the only one that really matters. What the series still has to show is whether the agent chasing that deadline is there to break the rule, or to prove it.

Release date and episodes

12 12 12 premieres on Apple TV on Friday, November 13, 2026, with its first two episodes. The remaining six arrive weekly, one every Friday, through the finale on December 25, 2026. The season runs eight episodes and is rated TV-MA.