Cops Get Too Much NYPD Blue Lighting

"Big Apple"
Tomorrow at 10 p.m. on WCBS/Ch. 2
2 Stars

HARD boiled-but-good Irish cop gets in the way of the Feds in a stripper's murder investigation, and he and his soon-to-be-hard-boiled-but-still-wide-eyed partner are forced to go work for the Feds.

Meanwhile, hard boiled Irish Fed has a hard boiled Irish pal from the old neighborhood who went bad, and is now working both sides of the hard boiled fence.

Hard boiled Russian mob guys who own the strip club where the stripper with a heart of gold (or at least gold enough to make hard boiled men love her very much) get blamed, but it's probably the hard boiled Italian mob guys who are really behind it (always) even though it's a Jewish guy who is maybe the worst criminal of all.

All the female staff in the precinct and at the FBI headquarters look like models, except for the black receptionist who is hard boiled, not thin, and jaded. Welcome to "Big Apple," the CBS drama debuting tomorrow night that is supposed to make you forget about "ER."

The cast is terrific, but the writing isn't.

First off, there's Ed O'Neill - and you'd have to be a big communist to not like Ed O'Neill ("Married With Children"), right?

Then there's Michael Madsen ("Reservoir Dogs"), Donnie Wahlberg ("Sixth Sense"), David Strathairn ("L.A. Confidential"), Titus Welliver ("Falcone"), Glynn Turman ("Men of Honor") and as the girl, Kim Dickens ("The Gift").

I especially liked seeing Frank Pellegrino, who plays the top crimefighter in "The Sopranos," playing an unlikely bad guy here. (Well, I think he'll probably turn out to be a really bad guy disguised as a clueless victim).

And hell, I can watch Wahlberg and Madsen all day - even with the sound turned off.

Now the bad news.

The whole show seems to be done in 60-second scenes and sound bites where everyone is deadly serious, and which you'd have to be if you lived in a world where you were always lit from the side.

This kind of look and sound was startlingly hip and stylized in the '80s, but - with the possible exception of "La Femme Nikita" - it doesn't really work anymore.

We have, after all, seen "NYPD Blue," "The Sopranos" and "The West Wing," so we know that you can actually have substance in TV drama without making it look like a music video.

Then there's the dialogue.

Like? Like: "The city is all doors, Chris. I'm going to open every door until I find out what happened to your girl." What?

What "Big Apple" needs (and please God forgive me for saying this) is some juice. They shouldn't be wasting first-class actors on scripts that seem as New York as a day in Cleveland.

For one thing, who believes that city municipal office buildings use mood lighting? There seems to be no harsh glow of overhead fluorescent lights anywhere, even in the 11th Precinct where the hard boiled Irish cops used to work. I haven't seen this much blue-toned side lighting since "Miami Vice" went off the air.

There is a reason for this, and it's that the show was created by three-time Emmy winner for "Miami Vice" Anthony Yerkovich and four-time "NYPD Blue" Emmy winner David Milch.

And I swear, if I see one more stripper in a thong swinging her thing around a pole while tough guys talk to each other, I'm calling 911.

Give the casting agents an Emmy and get writers who have actually been to New York. You might have something here.