Dark Blue opens with a scene of a guy being tortured by a sadist and his henchmen. The sadist wants to know: Is he a cop? A fed? Slipping into tough-guy mode, the victim defiantly spits blood on his interrogator.

OK, viewers think to themselves, having tuned into Dark Blue because they've seen the ubiquitous promos and read the reviews touting the show as being about undercover cops, one of the henchmen is in fact an undercover cop and he's about to put an end to this poor guy's misery, because that's how pretty much every one of these shows open. Except that here, it doesn't.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much where Dark Blue's creativity ends. It's a standard-issue crime drama in a TV landscape that wasn't exactly wanting for another one.

Dark Blue is another cop show from executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who seems to have his name on the credits of every crime procedural that doesn't have the words Law & Order in their title. It stars Dylan McDermott as Carter Shaw, the grizzled, gritty head of a secret, elite group of undercover detectives. Behind his back, he's referred to as "The Prince of Darkness."

Dylan McDermott as Carter Shaw in Dark Blue.

Photo Credit: Danny Feld/TNT.

His team includes Ty Curtis (Omari Hardwick), whose happy marriage is jeopardized by his deep-cover work, and Dean Bendis (Logan Marshall-Green), whom Carter feels may have succumbed to the darker areas of his job.

Omari Hardwick (left) as Ty Curtis and

Logan Marshall-Green (riight) as Dean Bendis in Dark Blue.

Photo Credit: Timothy White/TNT.

Just when you think that perfectly maintained stubble is a prerequisite for being on Carter's team, we meet Jaimie Allen (Nicki Aycox), the sketchily drawn newcomer, who became a cop to compensate for her problematic past.

Nicki Aycox as Jaimie Allen in Dark Blue.

Photo Credit: Timothy White/TNT.

Dark Blue's conceit is that the job gnaws at the souls of these undercover acrobats, who have to be convincingly evil to fit in the privileged, underworld milieu while maintaining their sense of justice. "I'm not worried about when you come back," Ty's wife tells him. "I'm worried about who you are when you do." In case she hasn't made her point, she adds, "Sooner or later you're going to spend more time as your cover than you do as you." But if they had really wanted to do a show about a job that turns people into monsters, they would've created a series about Goldman Sachs.

Dialogue aspires to B-movie drivel – "L.A.'s a big place with lots of bad people;" "Your back yard is the Wild, Wild West" – and plots can defy credibility. The script for the second episode, in fact, could have been directed more plausibly as a Keystone-Kops farce than as the intense, moody drama it's offered up as here.

In it, Ty threatens to blow his cover as a weapons buyer to have a quick tryst with his wife, and doesn't notice that he's being tailed on the way home. So his gun connection becomes suspicious and subjects him to a polygraph test – while pointing a gun at his head. Did it not occur to anyone that having a gun to one's head might materially alter the results of a polygraph test?

And it doesn't end there – the arms merchant's trigger-happy henchman decides to get all Oprah-sensitive with Ty, who's tied to a chair, mooning over how tough it is to have a hot girlfriend, while Ty tries to contrive to relieve him of his handgun. And it's not a cop show if there's not a gratuitous scene set in a strip club.

McDermott was a lot better at the darkly creepy charisma on The Practice than he is here, probably because that character was just written a lot better. The rest of the cast plays the tough-yet-soulful pose on the show pretty much the same way they do in the commercials, where they cross their arms and stare into the camera in slo-mo.

Produced in Bruckheimer's trademark slick fashion, Dark Blue looks and feels bracing and competent, unless, of course, you're really paying attention.

Dark Blue: 10 p.m. Wednesdays; TNT.

Check out a sneak peak of Dark Blue here: