No heroes: Wesley Snipes, Zachary Levi talk about new NBC shows

* HEROES REBORN. 8 tonight, NBC10.

* THE PLAYER. 10 tonight, NBC10.

WESLEY SNIPES has stories about Philly, but good luck hearing them.

"I got family in Philly," said the actor, at an NBC party at Spago in Beverly Hills last month. "We've got some Snipes in Philly. And the Roots boys are from Philly.

"I've got some interesting stories I can't tell you, about my Philly experiences," said Snipes, laughing.

Snipes, whose nearly 30-year film career was interrupted a few years ago by a stretch in prison for failing to file federal income-tax returns, is placing his bets on NBC's "The Player" to teach him things he doesn't already know about the entertainment business.

The show's one of two new NBC dramas premiering tonight against CBS' "Thursday Night Football" and the season launch of ABC's "TGIT" lineup of "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal" and "How to Get Away With Murder."

Snipes plays a character known only as Mr. Johnson, the mysterious pit boss in a high-stakes game in which unseen rich people gamble on the ability of a military-trained security expert (Philip Winchester, "Strike Back") to foil criminals.

Snipes was attracted, he said, both by the character and by the fact that the show was from some of the producers from NBC's "The Blacklist" (which will be the lead-in for "The Player" when it returns next week).

"I wanted to do something different," said Snipes, adding that he was interested in "understanding how the television game works and the business of television, as we [he and his production company] are producing television, as well as feature films, alongside what I'm doing as an actor."

Working on "The Player" is one way to "go to class."

One thing he's learned about TV so far: "They move fast. By the time this is over, I'll develop a photographic memory so I can just look at my script and I'll know the whole thing in one day. And then I'll always be ahead of the game."

You don't have to have watched the original series to watch NBC's "Heroes" reboot, "Heroes Reborn," says Zachary Levi.

And he should know.

The former "Chuck" star is one of the leads of "Reborn," a limited series whose two-hour premiere tonight comes more than five years after the show left the air.

Because, beginning in 2007, he "was busy doing the lead-in," "Chuck," Levi may have seen as much of "Heroes" as some of its former fans.

"I watched it before I started on 'Chuck,' " said the actor in an interview last month. "Once I was on 'Chuck,' I was, you know, [working] 16 hours a day, five days a week . . . So I got to watch the first season, a little bit of the second, and little pops through the third and fourth."

Five seasons of playing Chuck Bartowski, a big-box store employee who accidentally downloaded a supercomputer's contents into his brain, might have been fine training for "Heroes Reborn," if Levi were playing a hero.

He's not.

The show picks up five years after the end of "Heroes" and a year after a terrorist attack that's blamed on people with superpower-like abilities.

Levi's character, Luke, and wife, Joanne (Judith Shekoni), "are not cuddly people," he said. In tonight's premiere, "they lay waste to an entire group of people with abilities," part of a vendetta they declared after losing their young son, one of thousands killed in the attack the year before.

"If you're not a psychopath or a sociopath - and neither of us are, we're regular people - murder takes its toll on an individual. So we meet them at a very interesting place," Levi said.

"Trust me, I always wanted to have a superpower," he said.

But: "I wanted to do something that was a very drastic departure from 'Chuck,' to challenge myself, to challenge people's perceptions of what I am and what I do," he said. "I would rather play a very meaty, complicated character that serves a very specific purpose within a story."

That said, "I've never sat in so much heaviness for so long . . . Sitting in the heaviness that is Luke takes a toll on you."

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