Despite sap, A&E's addiction drama packs a charge

A&E's new drama "The Cleaner" is sappy, sentimental, melodramatic and clichéd, and it doesn't miss a trick. This is the sort of show where, when a kid wins a football game with a last-second field goal, it bounces off the uprights, the crossbar and then through.

In short, when it debuts at 9 p.m. today on A&E, "The Cleaner" is often all wet, but it also has its fingers on some live wires, and it doesn't take the Underwriters Labs to figure out that occasionally makes for electrifying TV, despite its numerous flaws.

Benjamin Bratt, the old "Law & Order" hunkmuffin, stars as William Banks, the title character, a reformed addict who has devoted himself to saving others from addiction. (Although this is A&E's first scripted original series in six years, it's based on a real-life "extreme interventionist.") Drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex: It doesn't matter; if you've got a loved one out of control, "The Cleaner" and his squad of fellow ex-addicts are ready to swoop in and do what's right, no matter the high relapse rate for such guerrilla tactics.

"Get the team together," he says at one point in tonight's pilot. "We got a kid in need."

Banks multitasks by directing an intervention over the phone while coaching his son's football game, but even at that writer-creator Robert Munic can't resist the hackneyed plot device of having him later forget his daughter's dance recital. (The instant she says, "It's at 2," a viewer knows, "No way he's gonna be there.")

Banks has a cozy relationship with the cops, in that he frequently helps them out while doing his duties, for instance nabbing a drug-dealing fence tonight while rounding up a promising high-school basketball star who's become addicted to meth.

Turning the lad over to his mother, he says, "I think it's all uphill from here. But at least he can see the hill."

Get the TV Critics Team together: This series is addicted to pabulum!

Yet it's also got some intriguing elements. Banks has a running dialogue going with God, and later reveals he made a deal with the Big Man to get clean and become an "avenging angel" when his daughter was born. The mission he's set for himself, however, hasn't exactly made him Father of the Year material.

"When I made the deal with Him, I didn't know how hard it would be on you," he says to his family.

Or, as his wife, Amy Price-Francis' Melissa, puts it: "All you did was replace one fix for another."

In fact, he's still trying to repair things fully in his marriage, and the fling he had with Grace Park's Akani Cuesta, the token hottie on the intervention team, doesn't help. When Esteban Powell's slacker Arnie Swenton makes reference to it, Banks kicks him right out of his pickup truck and makes him walk home.

When the characters stop mouthing the usual TV sentiments and let their genuine human contradictions show, that's when "The Cleaner" develops an edge, for instance when Banks accuses Gil Bellows' bodybuilder Mickey of being back on steroids, and Mickey fills a coffee cup with urine for him to test right on the spot.

"You're a very classy man, Mick," Banks deadpans.

They might not be addicts anymore, but that doesn't mean they can't find other ways of being self-destructive, and a potentially fatal relapse is always just one bummer day away.

"The Cleaner" is almost laughable at times, from its title on down to its irresistible penchant for platitudes, but then it will do something that abruptly makes the laughter stop.

So be careful. Start watching tonight's pilot and you might find yourself addicted to it beyond all reason and sanity. And at that point it will take more than Your Friendly Neighborhood TV Critic to pry the remote from your hands.

Remotely interesting: Heidi Klum's "Project Runway" returns for its fifth season in a new time at 8 p.m. Wednesday on Bravo. Klum plugs the show on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" at 11:35 p.m. today on NBC's WMAQ Channel 5.

Robbie Coltrane goes from "Cracker" and Harry Potter's Hagrid to tour guide in "Incredible Britain," a new DVD released today from Acorn Media.

End of the dial: WFMT 98.7-FM has set Sept. 28 for its third annual Midnight Special Folk Festival at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. Tom Paxton will be the headliner. Tickets are $50 and $35, $100 for VIP tickets, available by calling the theater box office at (847) 673-6300 or online at northshorecenter.org.