Ellen Gray: Hard to tell what 'Dark Blue' is about

DARK BLUE. 10 p.m. tomorrow, TNT.

IT'S EASY to see why actors might want to play undercover cops.

The dress code's relaxed, shaving's likely to be optional, and there's an opportunity to play more than one character at a time.

What's less clear, to me, at least, is why anyone casting a show about undercover cops in L.A. would choose Dylan McDermott to head the team, as he does in TNT's first original Jerry Bruckheimer series, "Dark Blue," which premieres tomorrow night.

Not that McDermott doesn't look terrific with a few days' growth of beard.

But as Lt. Carter Shaw, the driven, embittered leader of a super-secret group within the LAPD, McDermott's every bit as subtle as he was for seven seasons of "The Practice."

Which, I should add, in keeping with the spirit of the exposition-heavy "Blue," is not very subtle at all.

Not that subtlety's actually demanded here, as it presumably might be of people whose job it is to blend in with strangers.

(In fairness, there was never anything particularly subtle about Ken Wahl's Vinnie Terranova, either, but then, when I think of "Wiseguy," it's the bad guys played by Ray Sharkey and Kevin Spacey I tend to remember best.)

Shaw is the kind of guy who greets members of a rival agency by asking, in a tone of the deepest, darkest blue sarcasm, "What can I do for the Federal Bureau of Intimidation?"

Even "NYPD Blue's" Andy Sipowicz wouldn't have considered that original.

Shaw should be nicer to the feds - without the one guest star Kyle Secor ("Homicide: Life on the Street") plays in the pilot, we might never have guessed that "Dark Blue's" lead character probably wasn't always, as one of his team's wives puts it, "the Prince of Darkness."

No, he's a third-generation police officer, and a good one.

"He's got these huge busts - should have a penitentiary named after him," Secor's character reveals. But "three years ago, he just disappears off the face of the planet."

Like every brooding hero from Emily Bronte's Heathcliff to "The Mentalist's" Patrick Jane, Shaw's a guy with the kind of problems that nearly always have a woman at the root.

Is his wife dead, or has he merely misplaced her? Two episodes in, I still can't tell you, any more than I can tell you exactly what's going on in the pilot, which opens on a scene of torture involving water and electricity.

"This could go on all night. And it ain't gonna get any easier," warns one of the torturers.

This turns out to be an exaggeration, happily so for me, since I watched the show's first hour three times in an attempt to get a handle on it.

A second episode, which focused on one of Shaw's officers, a newlywed named Ty Curtis (Omari Hardwick), might be more representative of the series as a whole.

Also undercover: Logan Marshall-Green, who played Ryan Atwood's brother, Trey, on "The O.C.," as a seemingly fearless operative named Dean Bendis, and Nicki Aycox as Jamie Allen, Shaw's newest recruit.

It's too soon to say whether their characters are interesting enough to make "Dark Blue" worth coming back to, but there isn't one of them - Shaw included - whom I want to see with his or her feet in a bucket, being zapped with electricity.

Hey, that's something, right? *

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