At the risk of becoming known as the television critic who never met a gritty crime drama he didn't like, I have to admit that I really like Street Time, the new Showtime drama starring Rob Morrow.

While I don't like it quite as much as I did FX's The Shield on first viewing, this is another quality cable drama with intelligence and edge. Don't look for easy answers or good and bad guys in this one. Like The Shield, Street Time is a series that embraces moral ambiguity and challenges viewers to question their own values as they try to judge the characters. In other words, it is entertainment television that wants you to do more than just watch - it wants you to think.

Morrow, best known on the small screen for his Emmy-winning work in Northern Exposure and on the big screen for Quiz Show, plays Kevin Hunter, a baby-boomer marijuana smuggler out on parole after serving five years in a federal penitentiary. All of the messy complications of his prior life are waiting for him when he walks out the prison gate a seemingly free man.

There's his hot-dog brother, Peter (Christopher Bolton), still running the family business as well as a flashy, money-losing nightclub. Peter and his drug-smuggling partner, Steve Goldstein (Simon Reynolds), a fugitive, owe Kevin $1.5 million, which they don't have. But they do have a plan for Kevin to go back into business with them.

Kevin is married to Goldstein's sister, Rachel (Michelle Nolden). She and their 8-year-old son are also waiting for Kevin. The reunion between Kevin and Rachel gets off on the wrong foot when she realizes that Kevin saw Peter and her brother before he came home to her.

But the biggest and most troubled relationship in Kevin Hunter's new life is the one with his parole officer, James Liberti (Scott Cohen), a law enforcement officer with a short temper and a big-time gambling addiction. The juice of this series is in the unpredictable dance Liberti does with Kevin Hunter and his other clients. It is the movement the producers use to take us inside the culture of ex-convicts and the bureaucracy of a federal parole system that makes its "clients" anything but free men and free women in the wake of their release from prison. This is the story Street Time most wants to tell - and it tells it well.

The series can be obvious and heavy-handed at times. In wanting us to see how much Liberti and Hunter are alike, even though they are supposedly on opposite sides of the law, the producers give us one scene with both men walking their sons to school - the same school. It would be enough that they both have sons of the same age and share similar fatherly concerns, but to put the kids in the same school seems like overkill.

Furthermore, Liberti's bookie just happens to work for one of his parolees, a sentimental cliche of an aging crime boss. The boss, though, is given some believability thanks to a splendid performance by Red Buttons.

More important than any flaw are the performances of Morrow and Cohen, along with the passion and distinct sensibility of the storytelling. The writing is so intense you can almost feel the urgency of the creators to tell their story. That's probably because one of the executive producers, Richard Stratton, has a history so much like Kevin Hunter's, according to Showtime press materials. Stratton, author of the novel Smack Goddess, served eight years in federal prison for conspiracy to import marijuana and hashish.

Visually, director Marc Levin gives the production the same hand-held, semi-documentary look that Homicide: Life on the Street had on some of its best nights. Again, not surprising, since Levin is a longtime documentary filmmaker with a resume that includes directing some of the best work done by Bill Moyers for PBS.

In a word, the sensibility of Street Time is more baby-boomer than anything else - from its mixed feelings on authority and drugs, to Otis Redding on the soundtrack during the first intimate scene between Kevin and Rachel, or the Roy Head "Treat Her Right" poster in the kitchen of a female parole officer (Erika Alexander).

If you are wondering who Otis Redding and Roy Head are, Street Time is probably not for you.

TV

What: Street Time

When: At 10 tomorrow night.

Where: Showtime.

In brief: Rob Morrow in a thinking-person's drama.