Produced by two Hollywood heavy hitters, writer Graham Yost (Speed, Band of Brothers) and director Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Uprising), NBC's L.A.-set cop show Boomtown is one of the few new series to have generated anything akin to the preseason excitement that greeted 24 last year.
 
Innovatively structured and stylishly shot, Boomtown takes a crime and examines it from the varying points of view of the people the crime affects.
 
The result, in the complex but not confusing pilot, is a show that seamlessly shifts from place to place and person to person, and back and forth in time. While telling its well-crafted story, Boomtown also efficiently introduces us to the large cast whose points of view we'll be following ? including Donnie Wahlberg and Mykelti Williamson as detectives, Gary Basaraba and Jason Gedrick as cops, Neal McDonough as a district attorney, Nina Garbiras as a reporter and Lana Parrilla as a paramedic.
 
Curiously for a show that seems so strikingly modern and so tied to Los Angeles, Boomtown was born on a World War II French battlefield. While working on HBO's Band ? which earned him an Emmy nomination last week ? Yost realized that the veterans he interviewed had all given him different versions of a battle.
 
"I thought, what if I told one person's point of view of their whole experience of the battle, and then you see someone else's experience of the battle, and let the audience take these real and subjective viewpoints and put them all together?" Yost says.
 
Actually, Avnet has a different theory on the complicated show's genesis: "You want to know the real reason the form came like this? When Graham was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck."
 
While Yost's Rashomon-influenced idea didn't work for Band, it seemed ready-made for a crime show. He did, however, retain two other Band connections: McDonough and Wahlberg (the only actor whose part was specifically written for him).
 
Avnet, who worked with NBC on Uprising, was sent the script and thought it was "extraordinary."
 
"It was kind of fun and kind of challenging," he says. "I think it's going to suggest some interesting stylistic things we haven't seen."
 
Getting NBC's support for an innovative storytelling style in a season that seems to be heading back to safer basics was easier than you might think, Yost says. West Wing often goes back and forth in time, and ER opened last season with its own fractured point-of-view drama. Of course, doing a whole series in that style is a lot harder than doing one episode. "Believe me," Yost says, "I'm finding that out."
 
The key, both producers say, is to jump to another character's viewpoint only when there's a clear purpose for the move. "You need enough narrative material to make the next view satisfying," Avnet says. "It has to push the story forward, so if you're seeing the same event, you're not simply hearing the same words with the camera in a different position."
 
As the pilot's director, Avnet had to make sure the jumps were both visceral and clear, so that an audience could follow the puzzle without getting lost. His solution was a dreamlike, color-bleached fade that signals a switch in time or perspective ? a style designed to serve the substance.
 
"The purpose of pushing the envelope is very singular: It's to tell the story in the best possible way. It's not to show the muscle of a director, or a cameraman or a writer, in terms of being stylish for the mere sake of being stylish," Avnet says. "We have a conservative nature, and the conservative leans toward telling the story."
 
There are other conservative elements in Boomtown. The plot is relatively simple and completely self-contained. Neither the producers nor NBC, Yost says, wanted a serialized show. And like Law & Order (Boomtown airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT, after Law & Order: Criminal Intent), the show is heavily formatted, and the ensemble has to fit itself into the format.
 
Still, as impressively as the gambit works in the pilot, duplicating that success on a weekly basis won't be easy. The job could be even more complicated because Avnet, who will direct the first two episodes, is committed to the show through only the first 13. Whether he'll continue after that, he says, "I don't know."
 
"Frankly," Avnet adds, "I would never have imagined that I would do this. Graham's an employable writer and I'm an employable director. What I've tried to do is make my life available to do this show and get it off."
 
Of course, every new show is a risk ? particularly one entering a crowded field. Boomtown will compete for attention with three other L.A.-based cop shows: CBS' Robbery Homicide Division, Fox's Fastlane and ABC's planned midseason revival of Dragnet. "I thought we were ahead of the curve," Yost says, "and we're right smack dab in the middle."
 
Still, Avnet says, "what matters is, whatever we put on we're proud of. If we do that, then you take your good news and your bad news."
 
Yost says, "We're just happy to be at the party, especially with an odd-duck show."