Sleeping near the enemy

The Islamic extremists in “Sleeper Cell,” a 10-hour miniseries beginning Sunday on Showtime, are first-generation jihadis, an it-takes-a-village collection of holy warriors practicing and plotting potential strikes on L.A. targets.

They include an impressionable white kid from Berkeley, a Frenchman and former skinhead, a Bosnian Muslim, a Saudi national, and an African American ex-con. They’re supposed to be woven into the fabric of the city, dormant terrorists with jobs and lives masking the ultimate mission.

The creators of “Sleeper Cell,” Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris (“Bulletproof Monk”), want to paint the issue in all stripes and sentiments while getting at an airborne anxiety -- extremism in our midst, a war with no front. It’s a lot of noise around -- dare I say it -- a procedural; “Sleeper Cell” seems to devolve into a long, suspenseful caper pitting the feds against a band of twisted criminals, one of whom is working undercover for the FBI.

For all its putative complexity, then, its passing examination of radical Islam versus peaceable Islam, its allusions to Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq insurgency, “Sleeper Cell” feels more like “The Shield,” the L.A.-based cop drama on FX, the characters talking in overly stylized, expository quips, the L.A. cityscape whipping past in convincing fashion.

The subterfuge starts at a temple before moving to a bowling alley, in and out of vans, over to the mosque, across the border to Tijuana and into the arms of a lonely single mother; “Sleeper Cell” can be gruesomely violent, and the producers manage to shoehorn in sex scenes.

Showtime, trying to nip at HBO’s brand, keeps conjuring promising and topical micro worlds, shooting premises into the zeitgeist as if out of a cannon, only to see them drift to the ground in the middle distance. It seems to start with ideas and then work backward, toward formula. The network is launching “Sleeper Cell” during a “free preview weekend” window. The packaging is all there, a DVD that came to critics as a discreet folder with the tagline: “Friends. Neighbors. Husbands. Terrorists.” You opened it up to a picture of five guys standing around a barbecue -- friends, you figured, whom you would come to know and empathize with despite their horrific errand.

To be sure, this has been something to ponder, grimly, since 9/11, since Madrid and London, and last month’s hotel bombings in Jordan -- that continuing question of L.A.’s civic elusiveness but from a terrorist’s point of view, looking for a symbol. In an early scene, our terrorist protagonists are in a van, tossing around the possibilities -- the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, UCLA, LAX -- each possibility discussed in the context of freeway directions. “Take the 101 to the 134,” one says, “merge onto the 210, exit at Pasadena. Hit the Rose Bowl.”

That’s Ilija (Henri Lubatti), a Bosnian war refugee hardened against the West for allowing the slaughter of Muslims in his homeland, including his family; he is also a math teacher and connoisseur of early hip-hop who can quote lyrics to A Tribe Called Quest songs. The cell members are all middle class and educated, their love-hate flirtations with Western culture inevitably turning them angry and inward (there are no madrasas in the background here). The Frenchman Christian (Alex Nesic) drives a Hollywood tour bus and favors strip clubs, while Tommy (Blake Shields) is trying to escape his broken Berkeley childhood and his leftist-medievalist mother.

These three orbit around the cell’s good cop-bad cop duo: ringleader Farik (Oded Fehr) and Darwyn Al-Sayeed (Michael Ealy), a Nation of Islam ex-con who is actually working undercover for the FBI, and who is played in brooding one-note by Michael Ealy (I think he cracks an expression in Episode 4). “That’s why I’m the perfect weapon, just another American idiot cruising the mall,” Tommy tells Darwyn over lunch in a food court, the two taking a break from casing the place for a potential anthrax attack.

But it’s Darwyn who’s the better cover; he doesn’t appear to be acting. He’s busy, though, flitting between clandestine cell activity and meetings with his FBI contact (James Legros), while managing to get involved in an ill-advised affair with single mother Gayle (Melissa Sagemiller).

As the show opens, Darwyn emerges from deep cover in prison and into a sleeper cell led by Farik, who is himself operating under an assumed identity -- he runs a security firm and is an active Jew, down to his role as coach of a Little League team.

“You’re not supposed to think, you’re supposed to follow instructions,” is the kind of thing Farik says to Darwyn.

The cell members meet in doughnut shops, at the bowling alley, at the park. Fehr appears, with instructions. Fehr is a magnetic presence, but with the entrances he quickly comes to seem like a Bond villain getting out for some air (“Oklahoma City -- I was jealous till 9/11,” he says to the white supremacist with whom he is exchanging heroin for explosives).

“Sleeper Cell,” ultimately, only postures at the duality of the sleeper terrorist’s existence, the juxtaposition of the monstrous act with the banal ways in which hardened extremists can exist in the world for years before suddenly striking. It is that paradox that has heightened real-life investigative accounts of terrorists as well as fictional ones, such as “Paradise Now,” the current Palestinian film about two suicide bombers plucked from existential drift and hopelessness into violent purpose.

Here, it’s all teeth-clenching purpose and precious little drift, as if the producers can’t trust a down beat, don’t have the patience for the waiting and living part. “Sleeper Cell” promises the barbecue, the friends-neighbors-husbands part, but it keeps cutting back to the chase.