Television

NEW YORK – Benjamin Bratt remembers first hearing the concept for The Cleaner. It grabbed him, "however unbelievable I found it to be."

CHRIS PIZZELLO/The Associated Press

Benjamin Bratt stars in the A&E drama series The Cleaner.

Months later, he read the pilot script and saw the possibilities in this new A&E drama series. He liked how it's part serialized portrait, part procedural. As for a heroin-addict hero whose last-ditch bid for recovery calls for him to help other addicts get clean, well, this "extreme interventionism" still had Mr. Bratt scratching his head.

"In my first meeting with the co-creators, Jonathan Prince and Robert Munic, I asked them, 'How do you think audiences are gonna take to the idea? It seems a little outside the realm of possibility.'

"And they said, 'It happens to be based on a real guy' – Warren Boyd, who happens to be a co-producer of the show."

As William Banks (the character Mr. Boyd inspired), Mr. Bratt leads an assorted trio of other former users, a sort of A-Team (as in "addicts") who'll do almost anything, even at their own risk, to save an addict in need.

On the home front, Mr. Banks is a veteran of jail terms and rehab who loves but neglects his wife and two kids. He sees his mission as "the cleaner" as a pact made with God, a sacred calling that comes before everything. Maybe he has traded one addiction for another.

"A case is opened and closed each week," says Mr. Bratt, whose show premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday. "But that's not the whole thrust. It's balanced by this idiosyncratic, complex character: As good as William Banks wants to be – and is, in his chosen profession – he's far less effective as a husband and father.

"That's what excites me the most, playing that home stuff!"

In recent years, Mr. Bratt, 44, has been seen in a variety of films including Traffic, Love in the Time of Cholera, Miss Congeniality and as the poet-playwright Miguel Piñero in Piñero, which he calls his "proudest piece of work." (It's also how he met Talisa Soto, a co-star of the 2001 film and his wife of six years.)

But Mr. Bratt is maybe best known (and still seen in reruns) as straight-arrow Detective Rey Curtis on Law & Order.

"Audiences really like procedurals, but they often exist to the detriment of any personal life for the characters," Mr. Bratt says. "That's fine for viewers. But, after a while, it wasn't fine for me as an actor, as much as I loved that show and the people I was working with."

He left in 1999 after four seasons busting crime alongside Jerry Orbach as Detective Lennie Briscoe (warmly remembered by Mr. Bratt as "a magician in a lot of different senses of the word, a magical sort of guy").

A decade later, Mr. Bratt finds he's still a fan of the show, despite having been part of it.

"I've been to Oz and pulled the curtain back," he says with a chuckle. "I know what the Law & Order machinations are. It doesn't matter. Even today, if I'm running through channels and I stumble on that intro teaser, I have to sit down and watch. It's just that good." He marvels at its 18-and-counting seasons. "There's never been a show like it."

9 p.m. Tuesday, A&E. 1 hour.

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