TNT is looking more and more like a network these days. Which isn’t necessarily a compliment.

This basic-cable powerhouse has ambitiously launched three weeknights worth of original programming this summer with the sort of mixed results you tend to get on any network still searching for its identity. TNT’s mantra is “We Know Drama,” but it doesn’t always mean good drama. On Mondays, TNT’s stronger-than-ever signature series The Closer (which was hilarious this week) is followed by the forgettably mediocre Raising the Bar; on Tuesdays, the woefully dull HawthoRNe shares billing with the over-the-top Saving Grace; and beginning tonight, there’s a new Wednesday lineup, another uneven match-up pairing the terrifically enjoyable feel-good caper Leverage (9/8c) with the dreary police melodrama Dark Blue (10/9c), starring Dylan McDermott at his most discouragingly dour.

The irony of this pairing is that Leverage presents a team of career criminals (a grifter, a hacker, a thief and a bruiser, led by a slowly reforming alcoholic) who discover they’ve never had more fun than when doing good, scamming the scammers with the tricks of their once ill-gotten trade. Whereas on Dark Blue, we meet a covert team of good guys who go so deep undercover pretending to be bad guys they tend to blur the line and make everyone in their vicinity (including the viewer) miserable.

Which heroes are you more likely to want to hang out with? It’s not even close.

Leverage plays a familiar game (most recently on display in the AMC import Hustle) but does it with cleverness and a jaunty style. As tonight’s second-season premiere opens, the team has been apart for six months, and everyone’s itching to get back in the game. All except Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton, likably rumpled), who comes thisclose to re-entering the insurance biz—and, after ditching that idea, hitting the bottle—when a new case comes crashing his way. Timely enough, it involves a bank fraud in which some truly bad people are about to benefit from a government bailout. While Nate keeps trying to ignore the obvious, that it’s time once again to play modern-day Robin Hood with Mission Impossible-style con games, the rest of the gang snaps back into action, luring him back in. At almost every improbable but irresistible twist, one or another of the heroes breaks into a grin. They get a kick out of their work, and so will you.

Is Leverage great TV? Maybe not, but it’s awfully satisfying, in a Burn Notice sort of way.

Stay tuned after Leverage for Dark Blue, and watch that good mood evaporate in seconds. This series, from Jerry Bruckheimer’s procedural factory, opens on a scene of bloody shock-treatment torture, and proceeds to torture the helpless viewer with a cascade of clichés about the psychological toll undercover work exacts on those who take it too much to heart. “How long can you pretend to be something before you become it?” worries the team’s conflicted newlywed (Omari Hardwick), whose bride goes on and on about how she just doesn’t know who he is when he comes back from an assignment. (So she married him why?)

This same character says of tormented team leader Carter Shaw (Dylan McDermott, all glower and swagger): “There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to protect us, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to get his man. … Sometimes you don’t know which comes first.” Sometimes you can’t help but roll your eyes, when you aren’t squinting through the darkness or flinching from the unpleasantness.

The only character to make much of an impression in the pilot is Logan Marshall-Green (The O.C.) as loose-cannon Dean, who the feds and even Carter worry may have snapped. Refreshingly for this show, Dean doesn’t telegraph his emotions or over-explain his motivations. Unlike self-styled “prince of darkness” Carter, who lectures him: “There’s going under and then there’s stepping over. I get scared when I don’t know the difference.”

The show does manage to sustain tension and packs a violent wallop when it isn’t walloping us over the head with its own moody self-importance. But mostly, the show seems so enchanted with its facile darkness that it left me awfully blue. (Sadly, the second episode was considerably worse.) Cure for the blues: renting or buying season 1 of Leverage, now out on DVD. It’s a blast.