Profile : Spreading His Wings : TIM DALY MOVES FROM HIS SITCOM PILOT SEAT TO THE ELECTRIC CHAIR ON A FUTURISTIC DEATH ROW

It’s a hectic morning on Stage 19 at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, the home of the hit NBC series “Wings.” Extras are rehearsing a scene, while the crew is busy readying the sound stage for the evening’s taping of the long-running sitcom.

But series star Tim Daly, who plays clean-cut, strait-laced pilot Joe Hackett, is nowhere in sight. Cut to 10 minutes later when Daly appears in his exercise togs, his usually well-tamed hair in disarray.

Daly, 37, profusely apologizes for his tardiness, explaining he had a plumbing problem at home and hasn’t even had a bath this morning. Before settling into his cozy dressing room to talk about his latest TV movie, “Witness to the Execution” on NBC, Daly grabs his toothbrush and toothpaste. “I think I better brush my teeth before the interview,” he says, with a smile.

Though “Wings” is celebrating its fifth season, the son of the late actor James Daly (“Medical Center”) and baby brother of Emmy Award-winning Tyne Daly, never envisioned himself doing a TV series.

“It’s a good job and one I enjoy,” acknowledges Daly, who received a Tony nomination and a Theater World Award on Broadway seven years ago for his performance in Tina Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances.”

“It’s afforded me a lot of great things. But I don’t see this as my career. I’m not going to grind out TV series for the rest of my career. I’ve a lot of other things I’m interested in doing. This is sort of a nice, interesting detour I’ve taken. I want to be working for a long time. Hopefully, my career will be taking a lot of interesting turns as it has in the last year.”

Producers’ perceptions of Daly have changed radically since he broke from his clean-cut image to star as cult leader David Koresh in last May’s controversial NBC movie “In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco.” Since “Waco,” Daly’s been playing his share of wackos.

Earlier this month, he was a drug dealer in the USA cable movie “Dangerous Heart.” And in “Witness,” he’s all sleazy charm as a charismatic Death Row killer whose execution becomes a pay-per-view event.

“All of a sudden you play a bad guy,” Daly says, “and they say, that’s all can he do. Hopefully, I will keep people guessing long enough until they realize I’ve done a lot of different things. I’ve never been interested in becoming a product.”

Or having an image. “The biggest compliment I can ever get as an actor is to have someone say, ‘We didn’t recognize you.’ That’s not always realistic when you do something like a situation comedy, because you’re hired for your face or your voice. I will always look for things that are different from the last thing I played.”

In “Witness to the Execution,” which is set in 1999, Daly’s Dennis Casterline is an attractive, manipulative killer who claims he’s innocent of slaughtering a family. Sean Young plays a savvy program executive, a la Faye Dunaway in the classic “Network,” who comes up with the concept of televising a live execution on pay-per-view. But as millions of viewers sign up for the event, she begins to wonder if Dennis is really guilty.

Daly says he had to make a personal choice in playing Dennis over whether he felt the character was guilty or innocent. “I hope that at least for a lot of the people who watch it, they are not quite sure until the very end,” Daly says.

This choice, he says, is potentially dangerous. “You don’t want people to think it’s a wishy-washy choice. People long for black or white. He’s guilty. He’s the good guy. Sometimes they blame the actor: ‘We couldn’t tell if he was innocent or guilty. What a terrible acting job.’ But somehow if you purposely have gone for that, then you achieve what you set out to do.”

Daly took the project because of the provocative questions it poses: “How far will the media go to make a buck? How far will we go as an audience? What will we tune in to see?”

“In all of the discussion and controversies which have surrounded this film and have gone on about TV violence,” Daly says, “the one thing that’s very seldom mentioned is the fact that people have a choice to turn the TV off. We sort of have given up on the idea of taking any sort of personal responsibility for what we see. I don’t understand it at all. There are many things that I won’t let my kids watch. This movie, for instance.”

Daly points out that a recent article in Advertising Age magazine described “Witness” as an example of “snuff” television.

“You’ve seen the movie,” Daly says to his visitor. “There’s a minuscule amount of violence in it. It’s all inferred. The person who wrote that article, the mistake they made was that they confused emotional impact with gratuitous violence, not realizing that the purpose of drama is to make people feel something.”

Daly’s own feelings went numb while shooting the electrocution scene on the 50-yard line at the Houston Astrodome. “It felt like a normal day and suddenly it’s 4 in the morning and you look around and you realize, ‘I’m in a fake electric chair with my face on the scoreboards behind me.’ It was one of those things when I get a little perspective, I will remember it as a very strange moment in my life.”

“Witness to the Execution” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC; “Wings” airs Thursday at 8:30 p.m. on NBC; repeats of “Wings” air weeknights at 7:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. and Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. on USA .