At 9pm tonight, TNT premieres its new Jerry Bruckheimer series Dark Blue, about a group of undercover cops. The show’s tagline, “There is a fine line between going under and crossing over,” sums up the pilot’s thematic thrust: As Lt. Carter Shaw, Dylan McDermott (The Practice) heads up a secret force whose members mole their way so deeply into criminal ranks that the solid line between good and bad turns dotted.

With the first scene—a half-naked guy roped down with his feet in buckets of water that get zapped by a bunch of baddies—Dark Blue sets its tone: You know, Dark. I don’t know how much I buy the made-for-TV McDermott as a “prince of darkness,” as one character dubs him. Prince of romantically dim lighting, maybe. And the dialogue is fairly rote: “L.A.’s a big place with lots of bad people,” for example.

Still, the pilot’s slick, well-paced and enjoyable—and offers hints of how the series might become more than that. The questions of how far one can pretend to be a diametrically opposed person without becoming that person, of how to fight external bad when it becomes internal, are genuinely interesting. One of McDermott’s cops, played by Omari Hardwick, has a loving newlywed at home and an equally adoring mistress on the streets; he seems sincerely torn by his job-related hazard. If Dark Blue balances out the standard shoot-’em-up sequences with explorations into such character conundrums, it’ll rise above a mere, if engaging, genre exercise.