TV: Smith

First episode currently available for viewing at Google; show premieres on Tuesday night.

How much power does producer John Wells have in TV? When the pilot episode of Smith came in 20 minutes long, CBS didn't ask him to cut 20 minutes. They asked him to cut 5 minutes, and will be running the pilot with almost no commercials. Must be nice.

The show has a high-powered cast: Ray Liotta, Virgina Madsen, Simon Baker, Jonny Lee Miller, Franky G, Amy Smart, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Liotta stars as Bobby, who appears to be a corporate drone living the happy suburban life with wife Hope (Madsen). But every few weeks, Bobby gets a call from Charley (Aghdashloo), who has a new assignment for him; Bobby rounds up his gang (all those other actors), and they head off to pull off a robbery of some sort. In the pilot, three paintings are to be stolen from a Pittsburgh museum. The heist is clever and the crew cleverly overcomes the obstacles that arise.

The challenge here is to get the audience to root for criminals. There were two shows that tried something similar last spring -- Heist on NBC and Thief on FX -- and neither lasted very long. AMC had significantly better luck with the BBC co-production Hustle, but that's a show about con men; there's no physical violence, and each story carefully establishes the target of the con as a nasty sort who deserves what's coming to him.

Smith, on the other hand, is a more violent show, and the crimes are committed for purely monetary gain, so it's going to be a lot harder to get us to root for these characters. It's possible to have a show in which the principals are unlikable criminals -- The Sopranos gets away with it -- but it takes impeccable writing and acting, and despite a talented cast and a flashy style, Smith doesn't rise to that level.