TV

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

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 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 Boyd inspired), Bratt leads an ill-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 their addict-in-need.

On the home front, Banks is a veteran of jail terms and rehab who loves his wife and two kids but neglects them. 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 Bratt, whose show premieres tonight at 9. "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, 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 Pinero in Pinero, 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.)

In 2005 he starred in the identity-muddled NBC drama E-Ring (which, in its few episodes, drifted from a Pentagon version of The West Wing to a globe-trotting thriller). Earlier this season he headlined A&E's miniseries remake of The Andromeda Strain.

But Bratt is maybe best known (and still seen in reruns) as straight-arrow Detective Rey Curtis on Law & Order, TV's reigning procedural drama.

"Audiences really like procedurals, but they often exist to the detriment of any personal life for the characters," Bratt observes. "That's fine for viewers. But, after awhile, 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. A decade later, Bratt finds he's still a fan of the show, despite having once 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."

On the tube

What: The Cleaner
When: Tonight at 9
Where: A&E