TV is the New Reading

“The Beast” is more of the same

It practically writes itself. Ellis Dove, a young FBI recruit fresh from Quantico is hand-picked to partner with Charles Baker, a 20-year veteran of the bureau, to infiltrate gun-runners and drug-dealers and all sorts of criminal conspiracies.

No, it’s not on CBS, although it’s so like all of the Tiffany Channel’s other cookie-cutter crime dramas it could just as well be. Instead, you’ll find the new Patrick Swayze vehicle “The Beast” on A&E.

The title refers to the world of badness Baker (Swayze) has experienced in his time with the bureau, the beast that can take over and devour an agent if he lets it. On the one hand, his world-worn experience is what gives him the comfort level to bend and break FBI rules left and right to expedite whatever it is he’s trying to do. On the other hand, he knows that the violence and anger in his life has damaged him for civilian life.

One example of this is when he meets with his sister’s husband, who has shared the wrong information with the wrong people. He determines to kill himself to protect his family. Baker's sister blames Baker, but Baker calls him a hero.

And this exchange fuels the warning he gives his young partner: Don’t date your pretty neighbor, don’t form any romantic connections, because it will endanger them if some criminal is trying to get at you in some way.

And this hypermasculine theme gets borne out when Baker -- sidelined by a young gunrunner calling him “grandpa” -- grabs a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and waves it around shouting “Look what grandpa’s got!” before firing at his superior’s SUV and destroying it (which gave him the giggles).

The irresponsibility doesn’t end there. When Baker sends Dove to pick up the launch cards, the kid who’s got them is a self-destructive meth-head who also happens to be young, black and profane. The entire scene is breathtakingly exploitative. Now, when it is revealed, later on, that the kid was actually part of an internal investigation into Baker himself, it doesn’t get a lot better.

Basically, the show spends a lot of energy reinforcing the worst prejudices of its target audience, which so far as I can tell is elderly white men and women who see the world as filled with young, ethnic hoodlums who are out to get them, and thank goodness for these exciting rogue agents who are older and smarter than everyone else and will save us all. It’s as bad as “Flashpoint” and probably worse than the others.

All that being said, Swayze turns in an energetic performance, he and Travis Fimmel as Dove have good chemistry and the scenes where they’ve got to use their flim-flam artistry to fake out the bad guys are pretty good.

But if you’re watching “The Beast” and you feel like you’ve seen it before, that’s only because you have, about a zillion times, on countless network procedurals.

“The Beast” airs at 9 p.m. Thursdays on A&E.

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