Andre Braugher, the star of “Thief,” FX’s ambitious new crime drama, doesn’t just inhabit his character’s skin. It’s as though he comes through the television set and into your living room – practically daring you not to give him awards for his brilliant interpretations and enunciations. Until now there has been a self importance that accompanied him onstage – a righteous indignation that permeated his roles, especially the overbaked Detective Frank Pembleton on “Homicide: Life on the Street” that brought him fame. But the Braugher brand name has taken on a refreshing new meaning with “Thief.” This slick, addictive FX series, debuting tonight at 10 p.m., hurtles Mr. Braugher – and the television crime business – in a compelling new direction.

This bad-guy series has the misfortune of arriving on the heels of “Heist,” the NBC-Doug Liman project that debuted last week. But it bears almost no real resemblance to that trifle, drawing its structure instead from the darker, deeper worlds of cable. “Thief” has far more in common with “The Shield” or even “The Sopranos” than it does with “Heist” – dealing with the odd emotional dialectic between family and crime. Of course there’s a crew, a robbery, girlfriends, and high-tech gadgetry, but what a relief it is that “Thief” (unlike “Heist” or the BBC’s “Hustle”) doesn’t depend on glib caricature for its dramatic arc. Instead, like the city it’s set in – New Orleans – “Thief” struggles with the messiness and unpredictability of life itself.

Mr. Braugher’s Nick Atwater is a thief with a lot on his plate. He’s got a day job selling cars, and a wife (who knows nothing of his life of crime) struggling with the teenage problems of Tammi, his stepdaughter; in the pilot’s opening scene, he has to interrupt a robbery in progress to handle a cell phone call regarding a family crisis. At first, he seems to keep all the complexities under control. “It is what it is,” Nick says with a shrug. But by the end of the first hour, Nick’s personal problems have mushroomed into tragedy; his wife is killed in a car accident, and he has committed a murder in front of his stepdaughter – throwing an already disordered life into total chaos.That isn’t enough to keep Nick from the pursuit of a $40 million heist that becomes the thread of the series’s first six episodes, though. Nor are the Chinese mobsters, drug problems, class issues, and family tensions interspersed throughout these tight, heavily plotted hours.

Given its potential, it’s too bad that the writers of “Thief” (or, more likely, the supervising executives at FX) felt it necessary to echo characters and issues from “The Shield,” FX’s most successful show, in such obvious ways. The homage to “The Shield” seemed most vivid in the rendering of Nick Atwater as a moral, if flawed, central character with a troubled family life, in many ways identical to Michael Chiklis’s Detective Vic Mackey. The villains of “Thief” operate according to the same murky code of conduct that applies to the cops of “The Shield,” on the other side of the badge but no less likable. Other lifts seemed unnecessary, too, such as the use of split screens in selfconscious imitation of “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

But these wind up as small concerns. Most of what transpires in the first three episodes of “Thief” represent a real step forward in television’s depiction of the criminal mind – which, given the medium’s level of obsession with that topic, is no small matter. In the span of just a few hours, Nick Atwater confronts matters of death, drugs, sex, children, and money with a level of equilibrium that most master criminals would envy. (Just figuring out a $40 million airplane heist seems like more than enough to think about.) Unlike the goofy crew on “Hustle” or the distracted dreamers on “Heist,” the Atwater crew has more than money on its collective mind; these guys have to stay ahead of government investigators, Chinese assassins, and teenage girls. It’s like a chess game – except that on “Thief,” most of the characters don’t even know it’s chess they’re playing, let alone what the next move is.

***

It’s not considered a smooth or sophisticated form of behavior in New York City to watch a sitcom from beginning to end, let alone laugh at the jokes – and yet I found myself doing both during “Teachers,” a NBC midseason replacement that must be bound for the junk heap, if for no reason other than that I liked it. There’s no hokier idea for a comedy than a group of misfit public school teachers meeting for yuks in the faculty lounge, and yet this ensemble pulls it off.The show (which debuts tonight at 9:30 p.m.) embraces the harebrained idealism of high school teachers, and maybe that’s what endeared me – the notion that decent, intelligent people could find actual pleasure in slaving for substandard wages in a bureaucratic urban hellhole. Of course, only overpaid Hollywood writers could find the humor in a low five-figure income – but still, credit goes to Matt Tarses for writing a clever, funny pilot that deserves attention. Justin Bartha is suitably winning as Jeff, the English teacher who fights to make his classes worthwhile. Sarah Shahi (most recently a guest star on “The L Word”) plays a substitute teacher and is, quite simply, the sexiest woman ever to perform to the accompaniment of a laugh track.

dblum@nysun.com