It’s not surprising, when you think about it, that Steven Spielberg would lend his name to a 12-hour miniseries about Manifest Destiny. Who but Hollywood’s richest director would be qualified to document the endless riches available to those who could somehow survive the treacherous trek across the nation’s midsection and reach the golden hills of California? There’s something kind of odious about the way TNT’s “Into the West” has the glory of the white man’s dream built so fundamentally into its premise. No one in this 12-hour, six week extravaganza ever expresses the slightest doubt that all the death, disease, and destruction they encounter along the way is worth it – and why would they? The writers and producers of “Into the West” all luxuriate daily in the reward for all the trouble our forefathers went through to make Malibu safe for mankind.

“Into the West” isn’t a miniseries, it’s a business plan – a marketing strategy to sell DVDs, the lifeblood of an industry that can’t seem to interest advertisers in its stale, shopworn ideas for miniseries and movies. It’s a trend Mr. Spielberg started with the bonanza his 2001 “Band of Brothers” miniseries delivered to HBO; since then, he’s used the enormous muscle behind his name to reap riches from lesser ideas, like the SciFi Channel’s “Taken,” and now this dreary mess. TNT doesn’t care how many people stay home to watch “Into the West” on summer weekends, just so long as one day they agree to buy the box set for an exorbitant price. The purpose of launching “Into the West” on television resembles the way independent studios “platform” their tough-sell movies, so they can produce rave reviews and attention in advance of wide release.

This time it’s not going to work. You can see the wheels turning in “Into the West,” and I’m not just referring to the wagon trains and the Virginia wheelwright family – the Wheelers – who dominate this sprawling saga of the American dream that starts in 1825 and proceeds over the next half-century. Every moment seems calculated to wrench just the right amount of emotion – the pain of seeing worms crawling out of Jessica Capshaw’s injured knee, or of watching Will Patton being left to die by his own band of brothers – and just the right amount of story; the plot of “Into the West” is doled out in such deliberate dollops that we’re kept perpetually hanging by the loose threads left by its greedy writers. Where’s Keri Russell? What happened to Beau Bridges? Why haven’t we seen Josh Brolin is a while? These sorts of perplexing questions are supposed to keep us coming back. But they won’t.

It might have been interesting to see Spielberg & Company find a simple story to tell in all this, but with Westerns there’s always the temptation to out-dance “Dances With Wolves” – and “Into the West,” with its endlessly interlocking yarns involving the Lakota Tribe and the well-meaning white settlers who keep crossing its path, doesn’t know when to stop. Something about those wide-open spaces inspires even the best of directors to dawdle on languorous shots of dust and sunsets, and forget the story. In this case it seems highly doubtful that Mr. Spielberg did more than lend his endorsement to the enterprise (and to the checks). Had he employed the focused storytelling skills that make his own forays into historical sagas so compelling, “Into the West” might have made a tight, two-hour Sunday-night movie. But then there would be no box set, meaning we might actually be expected to watch this miniseries, instead of buying it and putting on the shelf – where it should have stayed to begin with.

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To its credit, TNT is using the marketing muscle of “Into the West” to launch “The Closer,” a summer cop series debuting Monday night at 9 p.m., which maneuvers itself away from at least a few of the genre’s most obvious cliches – thanks mostly to a delicious performance from Kyra Sedgwick as Brenda Johnson, a Ding Dong addict with accent (Southern) and attitude (bad). She has been brought to Los Angeles to “close” tough criminal cases; the job puts her in dangerously sexy proximity to an old boyfriend – now boss – played to cool perfection by J.K. Simmons. Both Mr. Simmons and Ms. Sedgwick are wonderful performers who deserve steady jobs on television, if not in movies; while I wasn’t mesmerized by the first episode’s familiar plotline, about a grisly murder of a computer executive, I’m willing to give “The Closer” a chance, just to relish their chemistry. There’s a lot left to explain about these two, and I’ll stick around for some answers.

But what’s up with all these victims on television getting their faces ripped off, and bugs crawling out of their orifices? Someone has got to come up with a cop show that returns the genre to its shoe-leather basics. I was watching an old “Law & Order” last night, also on TNT – a 2001 episode written by playwright Eric Overmyer – and its central case involved a divorce court judge who murdered a suspicious secretary who’d uncovered a payola scheme to favor certain lawyers on her docket. Yes, the victim had been tossed in the Hudson and found with maggots and worms crawling up her body, but that wasn’t the point; what distinguished the episode was snappy writing (“Infidelity is the world’s worst hangover,” Lennie Briscoe sighed knowingly to his young partner at one point) and clever plot turns. Maybe the folks at TNT could benefit from watching their own programming a little (“Law & Order” airs pretty much constantly) and reminding themselves that audiences prefer clever scripts to grisly murder scenes. Isn’t it rather wrongheaded of today’s television producers to want to make us avert our eyes from the set? Just a thought.