BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - There's nothing very clean-looking about Benjamin Bratt in tonight's premiere of "The Cleaner," a drama from A&E in which Bratt plays an addict who's turned his life around and dedicated it to saving others by performing extreme interventions.

Looking for the close-shaven, well-dressed guy from "Law & Order"? Forget about it.

Bratt's William "The Cleaner" Banks is a bearded wild man, and that's apparently just the way he likes it.

"I went to meet Ben Bratt for drinks to talk about this show, like, do you want to do this show?" Jonathan Prince, who created the series with Robert Munic, recalled in an interview last week. "He's a very handsome fellow . . . he was the Ben Bratt you know from 'E-Ring' and 'Law & Order,' that Ben Bratt. And I thought, 'Oh, God, this guy can't play the flaws. Or he's scared to play the flaws.' And we sit down, and the first thing he says to me is, 'Let me tell you something, I am not looking like this if we do this show together . . . I'm never wearing a suit and tie. I'm never having a badge. I want to grow my hair long, I want to grow my beard long.' "

Bratt, speaking with reporters a few minutes earlier, hadn't mentioned any grooming issues.

"I just loved the complexity of the lead character," he said. "I thought it was an interesting construct for a television series, an interesting premise, however a little unbelievable, and I said, . . . 'I actually really dig this character, and I think it could be a really good series. My only concern is that how believable will it be that there's such a guy as an extreme interventionist and what the hell is that?'

"And they just chuckled and they said, 'Oh, you didn't know? It's actually based on a real guy who happens to be one of the co-producers of the show.' And so once they said that, I played coy, but set about surreptitiously campaigning for the role."

The co-producer in question is Warren Boyd, who's spent the past 20 years of his life helping others kick their addictions.

"He'll tell you he's a regular Joe. You know, he'll tell you he's just another guy, a regular guy," Bratt said of Boyd.

"But that, in fact, is not the case. The fact that what he does in real life and how we are portraying it on screen is heroic. There's no way to deny that fact. And the way that informs the character played against the fact that he's a completely screwed-up individual, someone who is flawed, and as good as he is in his vocation, he's not nearly as successful in his home life, that was - that's sort of the best of all worlds to play as an actor.

"I've never really had the opportunity to play someone like that on television before. The characters I've played on television are a lot more straightforward," Bratt said.

But while Boyd's story is real, it's also in some ways a classic showbiz tale.

As Prince, who once worked on "Blossom," created NBC's "American Dreams" and last season produced "Cane" for CBS, tells it, his involvement with Boyd grew out of his realization that television was changing - yet again - and that he was going to have to change with it.

With "Cane," CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler, he said, wanted "a pure, serialized 'Dynasty,' 'Dallas,' and . . . I wanted to do [a] Cuban 'Godfather.' "

What he found: CBS' audience wasn't "interested in serialized dramas. They're a procedural network," whose hits, like the "CSIs" and "Without a Trace," tend to be self-contained stories.

" 'Moonlight' didn't quite work for them and 'Cane' didn't quite work for them," he said.

"So for me, I thought, God, I better learn a new trade. I better learn procedurals. Because I was fluent in serialized dramas, I was fluent in sitcoms, but I was way out of my league in procedurals. . . . So I'm at a party, of all places, in Santa Monica, Calif., and a guy I know pretty well, friend-of-the-family kind of guy - my kids play with his kids - says, 'Hey, I want to introduce you to someone. He's the man who saved my family's life.'

"I said, 'What?'

" 'This man, Warren Boyd. He saved my wife from addiction,' " he was told.

Prince's reaction: "First, I didn't know your wife was an addict. Thanks for sharing. What happened to Alcoholics Anonymous? And secondly, I'd love to meet him. I meet this guy and I say, 'Tell me about yourself,' and he says, 'I was at the bottom of my life, I was a heroin addict, ex-con. I made this deal with God that I would save other people, and that through that, I would get my life back. And now I'm an extreme interventionist.'

"I'm listening, I'm thinking - half of my heart says you're a good human being, the other half says, you're a TV show!"

Boyd called himself an extreme interventionist?

"Yeah, I think I made that up," admitted Prince, a former actor known for fast-talking monologues and boundless enthusiasm. "I don't think he would call himself that. He's kind of got more integrity than me, in that world . . . I was just trying to sell it."

For Prince, Boyd's story also screamed procedural. "You have to save a different addict every week [even if] it doesn't work every week, and they don't always get the bad guy."

The timing was good, too, for A&E. In recent years, the onetime PBS rival has reinvented itself as a home base for "reality" shows like "Dog the Bounty Hunter," "Gene Simmons: Family Jewels" and, of course, "Intervention," its up-close and often far too personal look at the lives of addicts.

It was looking to add an original drama to its stable, and Prince thought "The Cleaner" should be it.

"I said to them, 'Here are the shows you have on the air: You have 'Intervention,' you have the most popular and powerful procedural in the history of mankind, 'CSI: Miami,' [in] repeats, you just paid a lot of money for 'The Sopranos,' which is about a really messed-up family with a father in the lead who is not a good guy. And you have these 'reality' shows like 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' and Gene Simmons ['Family Jewels'], which [feature] these larger-than-life reality characters.

"I'm going to pitch you a show about a larger-than-life reality character. The father's a screwed-up character. It has a procedural element every week, and it's in the world of interventions."

As for the stories, "these are not Warren's stories, but they're all stories that are approved by Warren," Prince said. "It's not that different than 'American Dreams,' " Prince's show about Philadelphia and "American Bandstand" in the early '60s.

"I sit in a room with six writers, we pitch each other story ideas, I pull out 11 ideas I like. The difference in 'American Dreams,' you pitch to Dick Clark. These 11 you go pitch to Warren Boyd.

"So when Warren says, 'No that would never happen. I wouldn't do that,' or, 'I wouldn't take that case,' or, 'You can do that case, but it would have to go this way,' or he would say to us, 'All right, but if I took a case like that, chances are, I'd fail, they'd probably die,' so now you go back to your writers room and say, 'OK, we can do that story, but they're gonna die.'

"It's liberating, because you have the bull---- detector, which is Warren Boyd, and it's limiting, because you want to make it feel real," he said.

"We could pull from the headlines, but . . . I think the show will start to feel too much like an 'Intervention.' Or a 'Law & Order.' " *

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