Meet Jonny Zero, �alternative detective.� Before his unfortunate incarceration at Sing Sing, he was a downtown-nightclub bouncer, a drug addict, an absentee father, and all-�round hothead who killed people with his hands. On the city streets again, he�s trying to get his act together, which means staying away from his little boy and his former associates while simultaneously showing up for twelve-step meetings, a skeptical probation officer, and a part-time job wearing an octopus suit in a fast-food joint. So what if he occasionally employs trade secrets from his previous life to help a solid citizen in trouble? It beats fetching for the neighborhoodlums�on whom he is also obliged to spy because, otherwise, the FBI would bounce him back behind bars.

Franky G (Confidence, The Italian Job, Wonderland) plays Jonny Z as a nervous shadow, part Zorro, part Pal Joey. Trying to assist a frantic father with a missing child, a young man on his way to four years in prison for vehicular homicide, or a young woman who wants to box her way out of the ghetto, what seems to worry him most is reflexive violence. As if to buffer his rehabilitation from club thugs on the one hand and federal bullies on the other, he moves into an abandoned warehouse with a hip-hop D.J. wannabe calling himself Random (GQ) and a teenage former stripper on the run from the whole world (Brennan Hesser). All three will find themselves in the weeks to come stuck in the rinse cycle of a money-laundering scheme, dodging bullets from berserk bikers, and getting kicked around by girl gangs on the uptown dark side of Fun City.

However much Jonny Zero might want to remind us of such gritty premium-cable shows as Oz or The Wire, executive producers R. Scott Gemmill, Mimi Leder, John Wells, and Llewellyn Wells have all done time on network series like JAG, ER, L.A. Law, Third Watch, and The West Wing. They have learned to buffer themselves. Between metronomic menacings, there are equally predictable gusts of comic relief. Besides the octopus suit, a Central Park hack�s horse will be held hostage, while jokes are made about K-Y jelly and pizza. But at least we are downmarket, among the sort of people who are somehow always omitted from such delicatessen sitcoms as Friends or Seinfeld: the worker bees instead of the leisurely Wasps. At its best, Jonny Zero suggests another �alternative detective,� the Burke we meet in the novels of Andrew Vachss, the angry orphan and ex-con grown up to become an avenging angel for every child lost in the sewers of the city. Like Jonny, Burke has his own outlaw family� a Mongolian deaf-mute martial artist, a Harvard Med School Puerto Rican terrorist, an antisocial Nazi-hating electronics genius, and a gorgeous transsexual. Like Jonny, he has learned the hard way not to trust the straight world. And like Jonny, he�s into self-redemption, finding the FBI is no better than the mob�and less stylish, too.