TV

‘Reckless’ is a sweaty, not bright show

Like one of the good ol’ boy cops in its cast, this Charleston-based legal procedural is sweaty, not that bright and lazily chauvinistic.

Playing up its setting in the sultry south, “Reckless” concerns a pair of good-looking young lawyers wading through the muck and corruption and, you know, sexiness of the criminal justice system. It’s like “True Detective” as imagined by “Girls Gone Wild” creator Joe Francis.

Cam Gigandet (“Twilight”) is Roy Rayder, a city attorney who’s shell-shocked from a recent divorce. His verbal sparring partner is Jamie Sawyer (Anna Wood), a Chicago native and litigator who wears an array of tight red skirts (on which the camera fixates) as she argues for her client, a female police officer (Georgina Haig) who claims she’s been sexually victimized by co-workers.

Roy and Jamie mix like oil and water, if oil and water secretly had the hots for each other. “You drive me crazy!” Jamie tells Roy. “The feeling is mutual,” he snaps. The dialogue, unfortunately, never rises much above this level.

Equally swampy is the overarching plot — a nebulous involvement between Haig’s character, Lee Anne, and a leering fellow officer named McCandless (Shawn Hatosy). A taped encounter involving what appears to be a four-way sexual assault on a drugged Lee Anne is played countless times during the first two episodes; at one point, Jamie actually asks Roy, “Did you get off on it?” I assume the creators of “Reckless” are hoping the same of their audience.

Though Jamie’s supposedly a legal mastermind, she’s oddly obtuse. Lee Anne — discussing the taped incident, surmises that “he must have slipped something into my drink” — Jamie’s response is, “Like what?”

She also relies heavily on feminine wiles, working her cop boyfriend (Adam Rodriguez) for info while slow-dancing with him in a tiny dress, and repeatedly showing up for professional chats with Roy late at night at his middle-of-nowhere house.

The show also has a strangely archaic view of tech experts. A “computer geek” at the police station is mostly characterized by being timid, awkward and addicted to hand sanitizer; he appears to have been transplanted from a John Hughes movie.

(“In Living Color” vet Kim Wayans is also here, playing Jamie’s colleague, paralegal Violet Briggs.)

Standalone criminal cases in the first two episodes are dull, obvious and strangely removed from the rest of the show, while the conclusions to both cases are the opposite of a surprise-twist ending. You saw the explanation coming from a mile away and thought, “Nah, they wouldn’t make it that easy.” Then again, this is Charleston, or somebody’s idea of Charleston — “a big place, but a small town,” says one of the characters.

And, apparently, one where the clichés flow fast and furious.