Wanting a quick score

“SMITH,” a new series about a master criminal and the crimes he masterfully commits (overlooking a dead body or two), opens big. We have entered the age of the blockbuster pilot, a natural enough product of a time when a TV show, like any movie or Broadway play, has to generate heat immediately to survive, and “Smith” is blockbustier than most, with a cast of actors who are not only “from the movies” but also still make them; impressive stunt and pyrotechnic work; and real Pittsburgh locations, including a thrilling escape by water down the Allegheny River so nice they use it twice. (There’s a shot of the getaway boat passing PNC Park -- where the Pirates play -- all lighted up for a night game, that’s as poetic and exciting a two seconds as series TV will offer you all year.)

It is also long, this pilot -- close to an actual hour, and not the 45-some minutes that pass for one in current TV math. That added time alone is enough to give the viewer the impression he’s seeing something substantial. (CBS will air tonight’s pilot with limited commercials, all for Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” -- a Warner Bros. picture, while “Smith,” possibly not coincidentally, comes from Warner Bros. Television. And “Smith” lead Ray Liotta also starred in Scorsese’s “GoodFellas.”) This heft is real, but it’s also something of an illusion: There is less here than meets the eye, one might say, just more of it than usual.

Liotta also helps elevate the tone: He’s an actor who seems complicated just saying hello -- I think maybe it’s his eyes, which are sad, even when they twinkle -- and he distracts you from the fact that much of it is old cheese. Though “Smith” seems to aim for something akin to naturalism, it’s in fact highly stylized and choreographed, and although it is just these qualities that keep tonight’s centerpiece art-museum robbery consistently nerve-racking, some of the choices are surprisingly trite: You get the low shot of a car door opening and a high heel hitting the pavement (with a foot in it, I mean, attached to a sexy leg), the long-lens shot of a man walking in the desert (in this case leaving a prison). The characters speak in the language of pulp novels: “She’s trouble, you know she is,” and “The word on the street is he’s into Jackson pretty heavy” and “So what happened in Pittsburgh?” “Stuff.” Some things happen because they look good, not because they make any sense.

Of course, the series itself, from producer-writer John Wells (“ER,” “The West Wing,” the poor and short-lived “The Evidence”), is hardly original. Indeed, it’s the fourth team-of-crooks show this year -- after AMC’s “Hustle,” NBC’s “Heist” and the FX series “Thief,” which it resembles in a few respects, including the counterposing of domestic and criminal-business affairs and making the operation’s eminence grise an elegant, older woman. (I’m not calling you old, Shoreh Aghdashloo, just mature, in a good way.)

Once again, we have a “Mission: Impossible”-type team of specialists, any one of whom could model underwear for a living if this crime thing doesn’t pan out. There are Simon Baker, who was TV’s “The Guardian,” as the gun guy; Franky G (TV’s “Jonny Zero,” briefly) as the getaway guy; Jonny Lee Miller (“Trainspotting,” “Melinda and Melinda”) as ... the British guy; and Amy Smart (“Crank”) as the sexy girl guy. (There is also the traditional expendable guy, who is duly expended.) Liotta is the boss who wants to lead a normal life, as we call it, after a few last good scores -- presumably so he won’t have to, you know, work in his normal life. Bigger Boss Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”) is called Charlie, possibly in tribute to the late Aaron Spelling. Chris Bauer is an FBI agent on their trail.

In contrast to the insistent glamour that surrounds his gang, Liotta’s domestic world, though it is filled with Virginia Madsen and two lovely children, has been given a slightly bleached look, possibly to suggest aridity. They live in one of those tree-starved, cookie-cutter McMiniMansions that are eating up the hills north of Los Angeles, but they do have a grand piano, on which Liotta noodles consonant jazz -- he had a trio, we’re told -- and a couple of paintings, to indicate soul.

If anything is liable to make “Smith” above the well-made caper show it already is, it’s what might be done with the relationship between Liotta and Madsen, who is the closest thing to a character the pilot offers and, like, Liotta, suggests depths doing the simplest stuff. It isn’t clear how much she knows about her husband’s work, but there is some tension there, and she has her own baggage I will not deny you the pleasure of learning about yourself.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Smith’

Where: CBS

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Rating: TV-14-SV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for sex and violence)