Taut writing polishes 'Big Apple' Heart and soul of 'NYPD Blue' expands his reach in cop drama

Even people who have never heard of David Milch have heard his voice.

For seven seasons, the cops of NYPD Blue reflected Milch's voice as a writer: tough, smart, explosive, compassionate and unflinching in its willingness to confront personal and societal demons. Even beyond Blue, in such shows as Hill Street Blues, Murder One and Brooklyn South, this monumentally gifted writer has tackled America's tough issues -- law, race, morality and loyalty, all while exploring the devastating effect that crime has on victims, criminals and cops alike.

Until now, Milch has always worked with Steven Bochco, perhaps the most influential writer/ producer of our age. His latest New York crime drama, Big Apple, however, pairs him with a new partner: Anthony Yerkovich, a fellow Hill Street Blues alumnus and the creator of Miami Vice.

Together, they've come up with a complicated setup built around three separate crime-show spheres -- the New York police department, the FBI and the mob. By the end of the hour, the three spheres will intersect and their relationship will become clearer, but getting there isn't an easy ride. Milch and Yerkovich throw you into the middle of an incredibly tangled web and expect you to let it unravel around you.

Our guide, and the show's moral center, is Detective Mike Mooney -- played with instant authority by Married . . . With Children's Ed O'Neill. Mooney and his young partner, Vincent Trout (Jeffrey Pierce), are called in to investigate the murder of a strip club dancer -- a club Trout knows.

''Speaks well of you, the address coming so quickly to mind,'' says Mooney, in the kind of fractured sentence Blue fans have come to identify with Milch.

What Mooney and Trout don't know is that the strip club is run by the Russian mob, and that the FBI is setting the mob up for a sting. The cops' dogged insistence on pressing forward with their case brings them into conflict with FBI agent Jimmy Flynn (Titus Welliver), and with his increasingly untrustworthy mole, Terry Maddock (Michael Madsen). To assert their control, the FBI temporarily brings Mooney and Trout into the agency.

And that's just the main plot. There's also a significant subplot involving a lovestruck mobster (Donnie Wahlberg), and another involving the head of the FBI office, William Preecher (David Strathairn), who is afraid that one of his agents has gone bad.

Because he's the pivot in tonight's premiere, O'Neill gets most of the best lines, like this blue-collar view of hierarchies: ''Never share a theory prematurely with the boss. Share a theory prematurely, and you get second-guessing and heartache.'' Along with Strathairn (a very welcome addition to weekly TV), he also is charged with conveying the show's central message: Institutions are not moral on their own. People make them moral.

Yet, considering the enormous talents involved, Big Apple doesn't quite make the kind of impact it should. The ground covered in the opening hour is both too complex and too familiar; the combinations that will make the show distinctive don't arrive until the very end. In fact, there's such a large cast, and Milch and Yerkovich have so much to accomplish, that you may end up wishing CBS had given them another hour.

So we'll just have to come back for that second hour ourselves. Big Apple

CBS, tonight, 10 ET/PT

* * * (out of four)