'Chicago P.D.' more colorful than it sounds

* CHICAGO P.D. 10 tonight, NBC10.

TITLES don't come much more generic than "Chicago P.D.," the new NBC drama from "Law & Order" producer Dick Wolf that spins off tonight from the equally generic-sounding "Chicago Fire" (10 p.m. Tuesdays, NBC10).

But Wolf, who built an empire from a formula originally intended to make "Law" and "Order" split easily for half-hour syndication - and who proved, over and over, that no actor is irreplaceable - seems to be allowing his new franchise more latitude.

How else to explain that one of the recurring characters being spun off from "Chicago Fire" is a crooked cop (Jason Beghe) who not so long ago was beyond bars himself?

Before anyone gets too excited, NBC isn't exactly remaking "The Shield," and Beghe's Detective Sgt. Hank Voight, who's undergone a considerable change of fortune and is now in charge of an elite intelligence unit, is no Vic Mackey.

But he's no choirboy, either. And he's involved in something even deeper than he seems to be at first, suggesting just the kind of serialized complications that Wolf might once have avoided to keep more casual viewers from feeling left out.

"Chicago P.D." boasts a seriously beautiful set of younger cops, including Sophia Bush ("One Tree Hill") as a member of Voight's team whose history with her boss goes back a ways, but it also has plenty of veterans, including Jon Seda ("Treme," "Chicago Fire") as a detective who's a bit more respectful of the legal niceties than Voight, and Robert Wisdom ("The Wire," "Nashville") as Voight's justifiably suspicious boss.

I was particularly enchanted by Amy Morton as a desk sergeant who's not above enlisting a rookie to do a macabre bit of dirty work.

Based on the three episodes I've seen, I'm less sure how I feel about Voight's crooked-cop-with-a-heart-of-gold persona. In the world of "Chicago P.D.," the ends seem always to justify the means, but like the incidences of torture in "24," the situations that require Voight and his team to ignore demands for lawyers or to rough up suspects are designed to make such responses seem reasonable, if not inevitable.

That such things go on in any big-city police department is undeniable. Whether they're actually required to prevent greater evils is debatable, and it's that debate that tends to get lost amid the frequent hails of bullets in "Chicago P.D."

I never made it much beyond the first several episodes of "Chicago Fire," and I'm not really in the market for another cop show. This one has some great characters and some heart-tugging stories.

It also has a real sense of place, though I'm not sure how willing Chicagoans are going to be to claim all of it as their own.

You think our weather's been bad lately?

You should see what the adventurous scientists in PBS' "Chasing Shackleton" (10 tonight, WHYY12) had to deal with.

Things go seriously south in the first installment of this three-part documentary series about an attempt to re-enact explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1916 mission to rescue his crew in Antarctica. The show's unexpectedly timely in light of the tourist trip that went seriously awry in Antarctica late last month, leaving not one, but two ships icebound and forcing the helicopter evacuation of a few dozen passengers.

Shackleton, of course, had no helicopters.

In any case, this is probably a safer way to get a taste of the region's dangers. Though maybe not the best viewing for anyone prone to seasickness.