In its first venture into original scripted drama since its big bucks, big bang “Real Life. Drama.” rebirth, A&E sticks tight to the new tagline and the sort of storytelling its audience loves best — expertly blending the grit of the network’s signature reality series Intervention, the soul of its warts-and-all crime-fighter, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and the highly stylized drama of acquired series like CSI: Miami and The Sopranos.
“We knew that we had key platforms,” explains Bob DeBitetto, the net’s executive vice president and general manager. “At the same time, we wanted shows that might be a little riskier, a little bit different, but would still feel authentic and relevant to our viewers.”
The result is The Cleaner, debuting July 15, which features A&E’s recent Andromeda Strain star Benjamin Bratt as William Banks, a struggling former addict who promises God that, in exchange for a second shot at a standup life with the wife and kids, he’ll devote himself to helping others clean up, too. Er, whether they want to or not.
“He surrounds himself with a team of other recovered addicts,” says Bratt of his character, who is based on the show’s executive producer, extreme interventionist Warren Boyd. “They’re given permission to basically kidnap a person, put them up until they resolve their addiction — whether they’re into drugs, gambling, sex, porn, whatever — with the nod and financial support of family members or studio heads or whoever they’re dealing with. It’s really well written. And it’s a unique hybrid in that it has a built-in procedural element, which is familiar and comforting to audiences, and yet it kind of subverts the genre by balancing it with quirky — and I think real — home life.”
In other words, the paneling is a little old, the decor a little dated, and the conversations a lot like the ones you hope your neighbors can’t hear through an open window.
The show makes a minor misstep with Kani, played by Battlestar Galactica‘s Grace Park, who pushes the foulmouthed sexpot chick shtick dangerously close to cringe-worthy camp — but the rest of the cast is winning, particularly Banks’ closest confidant, Mickey, a broad-shouldered badass with a Fu Manchu mustache and a giant pair of angel wings inked across his back.
Ally McBeal fans, you won’t believe who plays him.