Jonathan Storm: 'Luther' takes 'em on

Let's go to the adjective store to describe Luther, a British police show premiering Sunday at 9 p.m.

Powerful, challenging, ambiguous, surprising, dark, odd, stunning, grisly, disturbing, raw, sexy, taut, intense, captivating. One critic called it "creepy." Another adjective comes to mind to describe the programmers at BBC America, which will be telecasting Luther: stupid. There are so many places to schedule a series, and they chose Sundays between 9 and 10:30 p.m.

This show is sure to appeal to Masterpiece: Mystery! fans, who have been wallowing in psychologically complex police thrillers for years. Luther has a lot in common with the current Mystery! occupant, "Wallander." Focusing on a gifted misfit in the London police department, Luther is even closer in feel to the Helen Mirren series, Prime Suspect, though perhaps a half-step below in quality, which is in no way a knock.

Masterpiece Mystery! airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on PBS.

Luther's not as gory as Dexter (what is?), and it's just a little more about solving cases, but it's also primarily the study of a title character filled with rage and bad guys who get too near frequently winding up dead.

Dexter airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Showtime.

Boardwalk Empire has almost nothing thematically in common with Luther. Its budget is much larger, and it bustles in the long-ago with scads of characters, while Luther is more intimate, compact and compellingly contemporary. But both are very carefully filmed. Frequently, if you've got the right equipment, you can freeze-frame and feel as if you're staring at a painting, one a little gauzy and baroque, the other a step or two from abstract expressionism.

Boardwalk Empire airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Thank goodness it's 2010, and a viewer is no longer helpless in the face of this absolute train wreck of terrific TV. You can record some of it. You can watch it later on demand. PBS doesn't give you another scheduled shot during the week to watch Mystery!, but HBO and Showtime provide lots of chances to catch up with their shows.

BBC America will rerun the Luther premiere at 9 p.m. Thursday. Encore airings of future episodes are yet to be scheduled, so after finding BBC America in the first place (in most Comcast systems it's channel 114), you'll have to check every week if you choose to watch on a night other than Sunday.