General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Cleaners

Cleaners is an American action-crime web series that ran on the Sony Pictures Television streaming network Crackle from 2013 to 2014. Created, written, and directed by Paul Leyden, it follows two young women who work as contract killers and become hunted targets after a job for their boss goes wrong.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Network	Crackle, the free, ad-supported video-on-demand network owned by Sony Pictures Television¹
Run	Season 1 premiered October 3, 2013 with six episodes released simultaneously; season 2 of 12 episodes premiered in August 2014²^•³
Creators	Written and directed by Paul Leyden; produced through Full Clip Productions¹
Lead cast	Emmanuelle Chriqui as Veronica, Emily Osment as Roxie, Gina Gershon as Mother, David Arquette as FBI Agent Frank Barnes⁴
Executive producers	Sam Worthington, Emmanuelle Chriqui, John Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Luca Scalisi, Paul Leyden, and Anne Clements⁵
Format	About 22 minutes per episode; 18 episodes across two seasons; IMDb rating 6.2⁶

Spoilers

Premise

Veronica (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Roxie (Emily Osment) are two highly trained, lethal contract killers working for a crime boss known as Mother (Gina Gershon). While on an errand for her, they find an unpleasant surprise in the trunk of their car, and the discovery turns the pair from hunters into hunted targets, pursued by the FBI, by Mother's own assassins, and by their boss's client.²^•⁷

The discovery centers on a young boy, Tyler (Jakob Salvati), who is the key to accessing embezzled funds from an illegal Ponzi scheme run by his father, Barry Madden (Robin Thomas). Over the six-episode first season, Veronica and Roxie become reluctant protectors of the boy, at times teaming up with FBI Agent Frank Barnes (David Arquette) against Mother's hit squad, led by the hunters Julian (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Kyle (Nathan Keyes).⁴ Missi Pyle plays Eileen, Tyler's mother.⁴

Season 2 storyline

Season 2 opens on a Caribbean island two weeks after the events of season 1. Veronica and Roxie find they have not escaped their past: the female assassins attempt to take down a major drug cartel while Mother hunts them down, and Agent Barnes pursues his own mission to take down Mother.⁷ The final episode, "Los Gallos Del Infierno", aired on August 19, 2014.⁷ The series is listed as ended, with no third season released.⁷

Production and release

Crackle greenlit the series in 2013 as a six-episode, half-hour crime drama from Full Clip Productions, with all six episodes released simultaneously on the service.¹ The world premiere was set for October 3, 2013, and in the days before it Crackle made the full season available as a preview on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Xbox 360.² Crackle positioned the show within a slate of originals that also included Chosen, The Bannen Way, and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.¹

Renewal and second season. In January 2014, during the Television Critics Association tour, Crackle announced a second season of the series alongside a fourth season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.³ The 12-episode second season premiered in August 2014, with Chriqui, Osment, Gershon, and Arquette returning and new characters played by Esai Morales, Omar Avila, David Rees Snell, John Savage, and Mimi Rogers.⁵ A Sony Pictures Television production report from April 2014 lists Cleaners seasons 2 and 3 as 12 half-hour dramas shooting in Puerto Rico.⁸

Reception and availability

The series holds a 6.2 rating on IMDb across about 665 user votes, and reviewers described it as fast, action-forward entertainment; one French retrospective praised its effective fight scenes and colorful, pop-styled direction while finding the plotting uneven.⁶^•⁹ As of late 2026 checks, the series is not streaming on subscription services in the United Kingdom, Spain, or the Netherlands, though it can be purchased digitally on the Apple TV Store and Amazon Video in some territories.⁶^•¹⁰

Other works titled Cleaners

The title has been used by several unrelated productions. The Cleaners (2018) is a documentary by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck about content moderators who remove disturbing material from social media platforms.¹¹ Cleaners (2019) is a Filipino animated film directed by Glenn Barit, set at a Catholic high school in the Philippines, where students rebel against expectations to be good and clean.¹² A science-fiction series called The Cleaners, in development for Prime Video, is set in a near future where inanimate objects carry people's memories and specialists called cleaners sanitize them.¹³ In 2017, Canada's Black Fawn Films developed a horror series concept titled The Cleaners, about a crime scene cleaner who mops up after supernatural killings.¹⁴ The singular Cleaner is also a common title, including the BBC comedy-drama The Cleaner (2021) starring Paul Wickstead's crime-scene-cleaner character, and the 2025 Sky Original action thriller Cleaner directed by Martin Campbell and starring Daisy Ridley and Clive Owen.¹⁵^•¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Genre web series: horror, thriller, science fiction, and mystery

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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