Tonight's Picks: Benjamin Bratt in "The Cleaner"

Onetime "Law & Order" detective Benajmin Bratt comes to A&E tonight as the star of "The Cleaner," about William Banks, an "extreme interventionist" who helps those addicted to dope, booze, gambling and other things get clean - by any means necessary. His approach is shaped by his own past heroin use.

"He is a good man, a family man, but a man with a past," said A&E exec Tana Nugent Jamieson. "After struggling with his own addiction and hitting rock bottom, he strikes a deal with God. In exchange for his second chance, he vows to dedicate his life to saving others from their addiction, a job that often conflicts with his role as a husband and a father."

"The Cleaner" is based on the real-life tale of Warren Boyd, an executive producer of the show. Bratt, Boyd and others dropped by press tour last week to talk about the show. "I thought it was an interesting construct for a television series," said Bratt, "an interesting premise, however a little unbelievable. ...  I said I actually really dig this character, and it could be a really good series. My only concern is how believable it will be that there's such a guy as an extreme interventionist and, what the hell is that?  And they just chuckled and said, oh, you didn't know? It's actually based on a real guy who happens to be one of the co-producers of the show. And so, once they said that, I played coy, but I set about surreptitiously compaigning for the role."

One question was whether the occasional raw language in the pilot we saw would air on A&E.

"There will be no bleeping...there is that sort of rawness to the character Ben's playing," said co-creator Jonathan Prince. "I hope that's what attracted him to doing the script. The battle - you guys as writers would love this - the battle is how many 'shits' per script are allowed. You can have two 'shits,' one 'bullshit,' no 'horseshits,' one 'ass,' no 'asshole.' And there's a rule. It's math, I think. It's sort of, in memory of George Carlin, we now know what you can and cannot say on A&E. We are finding out along the way."

Of course, the show also walks a line by bringing religion however vaguely into prime time.

"The pat that William Banks has with whoever was listening on that day when he was at his bottom, he chooses to call it God," said co-creator Robert Munic."It's not areligious embodiment of that, it's more of his belief system, his father in whoever's out there listening to him, because he doesn't ever expect to get an answer back when he puts it out there."

A director on the show had what sounded like a cool idea for when Banks is talking to God, Prince said, "to pout the camera way up above so we can sort of see God's point of view. And we said to the director, you can't do that. She asked why not. And we said, because we're not sure God's listening."

Someone asked the real-life interventionist Boyd whether the sort of forcible interventions seen in the show  - kidnappings, some say - work in real life. Don't the addicts have to be ready to change?

"I myself have learned that asking somebody who is stark raving out of their mind on crack cocaine or some other drug is ready, what they're pretty much ready for is to get some more drugs," said Boyd. "So getting past that is, I think, where we need to go. We need to get this person in a position where they can think straight and answer a question like that with a logical mind instead of a lot of frontal lobe spiking."

"Not every story, not every episode, has a happy ending," said Prince. "People go back on drugs. People O.D. People die. People disappear. It wouldn't feel real if it didn't have that. It's not 'Touched By An Interventionist.'"