'Rogue' review: Tough cop, foul mouths

DRAMA SERIES "Rogue"

WHEN | WHERE Premieres 9-11 p.m. Wednesday on DirecTV's Audience Network

REASON TO WATCH Perhaps a TV record for use of the F word?

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Netflix's got a show, Hulu's got a show, everybody's got a show. This is DirecTV's first big original drama, after grabbing "Damages" from FX and funding "Friday Night Lights" with NBC.

It's an adults-only gritfest starring Thandie Newton ("ER") as a California undercover cop with a familiar problem. When she's under, she wants out. When she's out, she wants back under. Ethically muddled and morally suspect, Newton's unsettled detective Grace, aka dockside dealmaker Jackie, has been burning the candle at both ends. Now she's getting burned by her family ties -- her 7-year-old son gets killed, her teen daughter hates her -- and her professional ties, too. The cops have had it with her rogue behavior, while her mob contact is thisclose to putting a gun to her face and pulling the trigger.

Can she play both sides to eke out a middle win?

MY SAY The bigger question is, will we care? "Rogue" is a seriously confusing show, all dark corners, oblique motives, scene fragments and Important Dialogue. In fact, everything is A Crucial Moment, played with intensity designed to signify -- something.

But arresting images and raw emotions do not a story make, much less a series that asks you to return weekly. "Rogue" is all peaks and no valleys of the sort that viscerally reveal setting, circumstance and personality. Sadly, neither Newton nor any of the cops, family members and criminal types around her exhibits the magnetism to establish that empathy in shorthand, so we're left with lots of unpleasant people doing brutal things for reasons unsatisfying.

While it's true that too obvious is bad in TV drama, so is too obscure, too gray (it's got that shot-in-Vancouver gloom), too pedestrian -- especially when it's delivered like A Big Deal. And with exceedingly profligate F-word invocation, also signifying nothing. Stop it. My ears hurt.

BOTTOM LINE Sound and fury equaling little.

GRADE C-