Since going into the made-for-TV movie business five years ago with “The Junction Boys,” a hagiography of Texas A&M football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the sports cable network ESPN has not exactly taken chances in its selection of material. Nor has it particularly excelled in the execution of such routine and dulling talking-point biopics as the Pete Rose scandal rehash “Hustle” or “3: The Dale Earnhardt Story.”

Based on Jonathan Mahler’s best-selling 2006 book, ESPN’s new miniseries “The Bronx Is Burning” — an attempt to combine the 1977 New York Yankees’ pursuit of a World Series win, the NYPD’s pursuit of the Son of Sam killer, and the city’s concurrent mayoral race into a single dramatic canvas parsed out in eight hour-long sections — is uncharacteristically ambitious.

Initially, this creative step forward is less in the Bronx, a young couple is talking about life, the Queens-bred punk band the Ramones, and the New York Rangers, but their conversation is cut short by a hail of bullets. The killer that will shortly identify himself to police and to columnist Jimmy Breslin (Michael Rispoli) as the Son of Sam has struck. While Steinbrenner fulminates about winning the pennant but losing the fall classic, police detectives Walker (Casey Siemasko), Kavanaugh (Nester Serrano), and Dowd (Stephen Lang), begin the task of tracking down a serial killer whose flair for self-promotion rivals Steinbrenner’s own.

Defying the wishes of his manager and general manager, Steinbrenner resolves to build his 1977 Yankees around the acquisition of slugger Reggie Jackson (Daniel Sunjata). Good-looking, intelligent, and a powerful home run hitter, Jackson is a headline seeking owner’s dream. But his unerring ability to irritate coaches with middling outfield skills and sudden batting slumps, and to alienate his teammates by talking himself up to the press, makes Jackson a manager’s nightmare.

The first 60 minutes of “The Bronx Is Burning” is so cluttered with documentary footage, voice-overs, superimposed headline exposition, and truncated scenes loaded with clunky on-the-nose dialogue, that it almost feels like a trailer for itself. Billy Martin’s impassioned soliloquy — “I mean what does Jackson hit lifetime, .260? Okay, so he has power but so did Mickey and he hit for average and he stole bases”— during a moment of marital strife seems addressed to an audience of stovetop baseball league players, not to Martin’s wife.

But by Episode 3, the series’ ego-fed love triangle between the boss, the skipper, and the hotdog outfielder reaches beyond the generalized tsk-tsking at actor Tom Sizemore in a Beatle wig in “Hustle” and the exalting of Dale Earnhardt’s lifelong pursuit of the checkered flag and his father’s approval in “3”. Mr. Turturro’s initially glum impersonation of Billy Martin grows in depth and reveals Martin (who died in a car accident in 1989) as a deeply insecure man driven by fear as much as by competitiveness and anger. After a similarly rocky start, Mr. Platt quickly outpaces the “Seinfeld” caricature George Steinbrenner that his performance initially evokes.

As Reggie Jackson, Mr. Sunjata, like Mr. Turturro, is not only willing, but eager to explore and exploit his character’s inadequacies. By Episode 3, a superiorly written hour detailing the psyche war between Yankees team captain Thurmon Munson (Eric Jenson) and Jackson, Mr. Sunjata pinpoints the peculiar combination of narcissism, intelligence, and faith that were the foundation of Jackson’s maddening behavior as well as his “putting meat in the seats” charisma.

Cameos by real-life Yankees Jason Giambi and Graig Nettles and journalists Phil Pepe and Marty Appel neither add nor subtract significantly from the series’ entertainment value or reality. Instead, the man who makes the most vivid contribution to the vintage 1970s feel is film editor Jerry Greenberg, the cutting room architect of such paradigmatic New York City set vintage films as “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” “The French Connection,” and “The Seven Ups.” Like everyone else involved with “The Bronx Is Burning,” Mr. Greenberg and co-editor Harvey Rosenstock’s efforts to discover and convey a personal truth in recent popular history grows more lucid and graceful with each episode.

Back in 1977, the TV miniseries was the stomping ground of ungainly melodramas like “Rich Man, Poor Man,” “Roots,” and “The Winds of War.” But in recent years, miniseries-length television shows like HBO’s “The Sopranos” have become the standard for narrative storytelling. While “The Bronx Is Burning” often falls into tepid scripting, and its perfunctory execution pales in comparison to HBO’s highly addictive weekly doses of character dramas, by the third installment it nevertheless shapes up into potentially habit-forming television.