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'EZ': Cops & Sobbers CBS's Mopey Detective Team

"EZ Streets" is a clear-cut case of assault with a deadly television show. It's achy, moody, glum, stylized and almost criminally pretentious. You wouldn't want to meet it in a dark alley, and maybe not in a dark living room either.

A cop drama that's heavy of heart and leaden of head, the much-ballyhooed series premieres as a two-hour movie that seems like a three-hour movie on CBS tonight (at 9 on Channel 9) before moving to its regular slot, Wednesdays at 10 p.m., later this week.

Ken Olin, once the dominant wimp on "thirtysomething," stars as Detective Cameron Quinn, a big-city cop with loads o' woe. Olin whined his way through "thirtysomething" and, for a change of pace, mopes his way through this, sometimes chewing gum in an effort to look cool and surly. One distressing thing about this new breed of cop show is that the good guys tend to be just as creepy as the bad ones.

Poor Quinn loses his partner to killers in the first half-hour of the film and then has to face hostile interrogators from internal affairs who think he might know the whereabouts of a missing $10,000. Quinn's father, it turns out, is an ex-cop who apparently did have a healthy supplemental income from Le Mob. Rod Steiger plays the part of Bald Bad Dad but doesn't show up until the last half-hour, and then only for four minutes.

"EZ Streets" also tells the parallel story of a young small-time crook named Danny Rooney, played by Jason Gedrick, who was the prime suspect last year on "Murder One." Gedrick seems to be doing this role with a jaw full of novocaine. Maybe he was having dental work on his off days. His performance is only slightly less droopy than Olin's. At least Gedrick sneaks in a smile now and then.

In the first scene we see Quinn at the docks, where a mysterious barrel full of something is unloaded from a small boat; only at the end of the show is it revealed what's in the barrel. Meanwhile, Rooney is just being released from prison after serving three years for robbery, and it couldn't have been hard time for the kid because prison officials let him keep his hunky Hollywood haircut.

A mob boss named Murtha, played by Joe Pantoliano, tries to get the young man to reenlist in the underworld, as it used to be called. The rest of the film cuts back and forth between Quinn's story and Rooney's. Once, near the end, they actually see each other on the street (and what a thrill-packed moment that is) but they don't speak. That's apparently being saved for a later, even more thrill-packed episode.

In making his spiel to reclaim Rooney, Murtha promises he'll take care of Rooney's parole officer.

Murtha: "I'll make him as happy as a clam in red sauce."

Rooney: "In my experience, clams ain't particularly happy in red sauce."

Murtha: "Danny -- are you lookin' for a job, or a metaphor?"

Yes, that must be just the way such people talk, don't you think?

Everybody in the cast of characters is bitter and bellicose and full of cheap angst. Even when Olin has sex with a young woman, their morning-after chitchat is hostile and sour. It's a world of testy toughs and hard-boiled babes, a world that audiences have innumerable chances to visit in the films of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino and their legions of imitators. How many more trips to that world do we really want to take?

Writer-director Paul Haggis apparently wants viewers to find the milieu sort of coldly glamorous. Cold it is, but it's much more tired than glamorous. All that corny macho posturing! Is that going to survive into the next century too? TV and film producers do all they can to keep it alive. Even Debrah Farentino, who plays a shady lawyer in "EZ," does some macho posturing. She also does a scene in which she frisks Olin ("Pat me down," he says) and briefly kneels before him in a suggestive position.

All the performances seem mannered. The show is plagued with arch, actorly acting, the kind that rings false and calls attention to its own falseness. There's also an abundance of dirty words, mostly a common term for testicles (CBS is preceding the show with a parental advisory), and the occasional spurt of violence.

Naturally, things blow up. Things always blow up in movies like this. A van go boom, then a whole house go boom. A man who had been kind enough to give ex-con Rooney a job is severely beaten and kicked by him after the man objects to Rooney spending all his time on the phone. Later, a mobster presses a nail into the palm of the mayor (Carl Lumbly) and draws blood during a private meeting.

Probably the most gimmicky sequence finds white mobsters playing black gang members in a sandlot baseball game. When the pitcher hits the batter, Pantoliano, with the ball, everybody on the field pulls out a gun. Soon Pantoliano has pounced on the pitcher and each holds a gun to the other's head. This, it appears, is supposed to be comic relief.

The title, incidentally, refers to the "alphabet streets" of the unnamed city, which run along the waterfront, E Street through W Street. Where does the "Z" come from? An old cop explains it would sound silly to refer to the "Ew-ees" but the "Ee-zees" has a nice "ironic" ring to it. The speech explaining this goes on at great length, as does another in which a punk discusses the efficacy of Formula 409 vs. Tide with ammonia in getting out bloodstains.

The settings, indoors and outdoors, are brutally bleak, and the show has been souped up with a soundtrack full of musical wails and lamentations. There's no shortage of attitude to the production, that's for sure, but how far does attitude get you, really?

Already some critics have hailed the show as a breakthrough. True enough -- it's a breakthrough from tedium into torpor. One reviewer called it "evocative," and that may be accurate, too; "EZ Streets" is evocative of a stale cheese sandwich, a cold day in northern Minnesota, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Oh, and a really really bad movie.