Working the case till he gets it right

In ABC’s “Day Break,” which takes over the time slot of the vacationing “Lost,” starting at 9 tonight, the Adonis of an actor Taye Diggs plays L.A. detective Brett Hopper, who is being framed, mysteriously, for the murder of an assistant district attorney.

The noirish hook of the series, instantly felt in the whiz-bang, slick pilot, is that Hopper’s the victim of a setup on a day that -- even more mysteriously -- keeps repeating itself. The do-overs allow Hopper both to investigate the vast conspiracy against him and get to places earlier than he did the last time, to noodle with outcomes.

“Just remember,” a shadowy, reemerging villain keeps telling Hopper, “for every decision, there’s a consequence.”

Tell me about it, villain: If I could do over yesterday, I wouldn’t have attempted La Brea to Fountain. On some development log line, probably, “Day Break” was described as “Groundhog Day” meets “24.” But the show is, at the same time, attempting an extra-genre affair with a psychological thriller like the recent “Memento” or “Minority Report,” and it’s just the problem: “Day Break” has no psychology.

Nothing of much interest, anyway. Mostly, it has its tangled plot and Diggs, who’s stiff as an action star, his physique conveying more than his face. You begin to feel strung along on an errand whose complexities can’t mask the fact that the main character isn’t great company.

Psychology -- admittedly of the pop, reconstituted Freudian variety -- is how the reality-bending “Lost” became more than a fantasy-mystery about a plane crash on a weird island. Those character flashbacks -- in Season 1, anyway -- were the show’s neat surprise, what encouraged your involvement; the tension of the island’s identity ran alongside the tension of who these people were, in former lives, and what they were still hiding, both from one another and themselves.

On “Day Break,” being able to jump back in time, to the same time, yields no crisis of identity, just one of evolving victimhood. It’s the difference between the arch mystery this is and the existential thriller it isn’t. Bill Murray, as a feckless weatherman in “Groundhog Day,” stuck in a Podunk town on the same day until he broke out of himself, traveled a wide and much more appealing swath just sitting at a bar, ordering and reordering a drink, hitting and re-hitting on Andie MacDowell.

Hopper, it goes without saying, has no inner life, though he has a dog named Rambis and a sister, Jennifer (Meta Golding), he seems to care about. Each day begins at 6:18 a.m. (cue close-up of digital clock), Hopper in bed next to his girlfriend, Rita (Moon Bloodgood), the ex-wife of one of the show’s heavies, Chad Shelten (Adam Baldwin), an internal affairs guy.

The premise has some nice touches. Each day, Hopper must save the same haughty Realtor talking on her Blue Tooth from being run over by a bus; his begrudging loyalty to this event, combined with her constant, oblivious ingratitude, has the makings of a real relationship.

More of a relationship, in fact, than the one Hopper has with Rita.

She’s quite lovely, a nurse, and each morning, because it’s the same one, she repeats her offer to scrub his back in the shower. I was hoping just once Hopper would say to hell with it and take a sick-of-this-plot-against-me day, let a beautiful nurse scrub his awesome back, but no, he’s too busy. One morning they do get away for the weekend, Hopper trying to dodge the part of the day where he gets arrested for murder and she gets shot.

“I love you” is what he tells her that morning. But I didn’t really feel it. Of course, tomorrow is another day.

paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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‘Day Break’

Where: ABC

When: 9 tonight

Rating: TV-MA-V (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17, with an advisory for violence)