Noah Wyle gives a must-see performance in CBS' occasionally clunky 'Red Line'

"The Red Line" is a well-intentioned and sometimes beautifully acted CBS miniseries about race and justice (parts 1 and 2 premiere at 7 p.m. Sunday, April 28) that gets off to a clunky and heavy-handed start, with a string of coincidences that might shoo away a been-there/done-that type of viewer who has plenty else to watch. My advice, however, is to stick around.

The plot is well-marked and the themes are mostly delivered by bullhorn, but I'll just walk you through it anyhow: An African American doctor, Harrison Brennan (Corey Reynolds), leaves his night shift at a Chicago hospital, stops to pick up milk at a convenience store and gets caught in the middle of an armed robbery. The gunman flees, and Harrison reaches over the counter to try to help the frightened, injured store owner.

That's when a white police officer, Paul Evans (Noel Fisher), bursts through the door and - seeing a black man in a hoodie and a bleeding clerk - immediately shoots and kills the unarmed Brennan. The incident becomes a watershed event across the demographic chasms of Chicago (or, one should say, the overblown Chicago we so frequently see on the TV schedule).

Harrison leaves behind a husband, Daniel Calder (Noah Wyle), and the couple's teenage daughter, Jira (Aliyah Royale), whom they adopted as an infant. In her grief, Jira has a renewed fervor to meet her biological mother - on the premise that her white father cannot fully relate to her grief as the black daughter of a black father who was shot by a cop. You can never understand, Jira tells Daniel, because this sort of thing would never happen to you.

Jira's mother's identity is sealed away in the adoption files, but viewers already know she is Tia Young (Emayatzy Corinealdi), a candidate in a heated campaign for city alderman, running partly on a platform promise to do more about police shootings than her opponent, a longtime incumbent, has done. The story keeps rippling outward, using the elevated train that links the city's north and south sides (and provides the show's title) as a simplistic metaphor.

On the story's flip side, a Chicago's state's attorney declines to charge Paul with murder and he returns to the beat, much to the relief of his family of cops, including his father (Conor O'Farrell) and an older brother (Michael Patrick Thorton), who was wounded in the line of duty. Part of why Paul evaded charges in Harrison's death is that the convenience store's security video is missing; not surprisingly, the tape is in the possession of Paul's former police partner, Vic (Elizabeth Laidlaw), who swiped it before other officers arrived.

So much drama, which quickly becomes too much drama. "The Red Line's" list of executive producers notably includes Greg Berlanti ("You," "Arrow") and Ava DuVernay ("Queen Sugar," "Selma") and their effort, along with that of creators/writers Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss, certainly doesn't lack heart, especially once you get past the first hour and its surplus of talking points. (CBS is airing the series in two-hour chunks each Sunday through May 19.)

At times, "The Red Line" exhibits some of the care and thoughtful structure that viewers so loved in John Ridley's riveting and topical ABC series "American Crime" or in Veena Sud's single season of Netflix's superb "Seven Seconds." At other times it lapses into some network habits, sacrificing its rawness for a more polished, procedural approach. It can feel as if the show's cinematic ambitions lose out to an ineffable CBS-ness that insists on order and outcome - particularly in the final hour, which feels overly spackled with epilogue.

Some viewers may welcome that; not everyone digs artistic ambiguity, especially in prime time. "The Red Line" is full of necessary arguments, particularly on the victim's side - characters frequently say the "wrong" thing to other characters, which leads to an abundance of scenes where people apologize for what they said. For a TV drama, it's a little too much talk about talk.

There are, however, some knockout performances that make the series worth seeing through to the end - especially from Wyle, who fearlessly weeps, rages and broods from scene to scene, lending particular depth to playing a gay widower doing his best to raise a child and recover. He embraces the role with an energy and sense of dignity that might surprise more than a few viewers. Royale is also impressive as Jira, the teenager who disobeys her elders to seek out her mother and finds that it is not the easy catharsis she desperately wanted.

"The Red Line" also stumbles when it travels into Blue Lives Matter territory, leaning too heavily on Irish cop stereotypes and easy tropes of corruption. As it unfolds, the series raises questions about whether Paul is redeemable, given his willingness to grasp at any excuse that will soothe his conscience. The results of this soul-searching get scrambled in the telling.

I've long wondered why TV has yet to deliver a long story arc from the point of view of a white cop who has killed an innocent person of color. Despite terrific work in Fisher's performance, "The Red Line" falls short of that goal.