TORONTO - Damaged but brilliant cops seem to be a staple of prime time procedurals these days, but few TV detectives appear as unhinged as CBC's latest anti-hero on "Cracked."
Faced with a suicidal knife-wielding assailant, Det. Aiden Black puts a gun to his own temple in a bid to calm the rattled guy down.
"Cracked" star David Sutcliffe admits his traumatized character often seems to have much in common with the people he investigates but he says that's what makes him so compelling.
"He's struggling with his sanity, he's struggling with his perception, he's got issues," says Sutcliffe, best known for playing Rory's dad on "Gilmore Girls."
"I think he's got a lot of fear, I think he doesn't know exactly what's going on in terms of where the direction of his career is going."
Det. Black is darker than most.
After an embarrassing public breakdown, he's reassigned from a demanding post with the SWAT team to the newly created Psych Crimes and Crisis Unit.
There, he's partnered with forensic psychiatrist Dr. Daniella Ridley, played by Stefanie von Pfetten. She's tasked with helping Black suss out the emotional impulse behind the bizarre crimes they investigate, as well as surreptitiously keeping an eye on Black's simmering post-traumatic stress disorder.
All the stories on "Cracked" revolve around some sort of mental health issue, says von Pfetten, who adds that she feels a huge responsibility to make sure the issues the show tackles are presented with sensitivity.
"We're not a 'Criminal Minds' where someone is a psychopath or a sociopath and that's associated with mental illness or anything like that," says von Pfetten, whose other credits include "NCIS" and "Battlestar Galactica."
"(And) it's not that anyone who has a mental illness is the perpetrator or guilty. It's just that in every episode we have a story that involves different types of psychological cases. So it can involve a character with a mental illness but that doesn't mean the person is the criminal."
She notes that the series is inspired by a real Toronto unit in which police officers are partnered with psychiatric nurses to do outreach with the community. The premise of "Cracked" takes things a step further by having cop-psychiatrist teams actually investigate crimes.
It was created by writer Tracey Forbes, whose credits include "Flashpoint" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and Toronto emergency task force officer Calum de Hartog.
"The way my character looks at it is mental illness is not a moral choice or anything like that, it's an illness, it's like cancer, you know," says von Pfetten, adding that society appears more willing to examine psychological issues these days.
"It's more out in the open now than it used to be. It's not something to be ashamed of or shied away from."
Perhaps that explains the wave of the tortured anti-heroes populating the prime time schedule.
Already on the dial we have the recovering drug addict Sherlock Holmes from "Elementary" on CBS and Global, while later this month Kevin Bacon stars as a deeply damaged ex-FBI agent in the psychological thriller "The Following" on Fox and CTV.
NBC is also set to debut the Jekyll-and-Hyde inspired "Do No Harm," centred on a neurosurgeon suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
Sutcliffe stops short of describing Black as unbalanced or unstable, noting simply that he harbours a sadness and anger that most people should be able to relate to.
His personal demons get fleshed out in a longer story arc that runs alongside the weekly crime tales, he says, while von Pfetten hints that the way Black and Ridley relate to each other will be a big part of the series as it unfolds.
"Being partners they're already getting involved in a personal relationship of some kind but they're still establishing trust between the two of them," she says of the early episodes.
"They come from very different worlds 鈥� he's a cop and she's a psychiatrist 鈥� and they have two different ways, two thought processes, two different ways of solving crimes and very different back stories. There are times where they help each other and there are times where they clash. And that gives us a lot of different places to go."
"Cracked" debuts Tuesday on CBC.
