Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you are well aware of Patrick Swayze’s battle with pancreatic cancer. Last week he sat down with Barbara Walters, who seemed to expect an optimistic, smiley interview, but instead received a brutally honest man telling the world that hell yes, he’s scared for his life and that he’s pissed he’s been stricken with a potentially fatal disease. After it was revealed almost a year ago that Swayze was ill, A&E announced that the actor would be starring in a new crime drama, The Beast, which has its premiere this Thursday night, 1/15/09. Going into watching the first two episodes of The Beast, although I was championing Swayze and hoping he would go into remission, there was still the fact that Swayze’s track record as an actor is “iffy” at best. People are going to tune in to watch the show out of morbid fascination, true, but will they return a week later? A month later? I hope so, because The Beast delivers the goods. It’s a tight, tense drama about loyalty and duty that allows Swayze the opportunity to really shine as an actor.

Swayze stars as Charles Barker, an effective FBI veteran whose hard-edged and questionable tactics have won him a reputation as a man who gets the job done at any cost. Barker has a rookie partner, Ellis Dove (Travis Fimmel), who is unsure how to react to Barker most of the time. Despite his apprehension to the way Barker gets things done, Dove realizes that his mentor is, at his core, a good man, and this creates a loyalty to Barker. Barker sees something of himself in the swaggering, cocksure attitude of Dove and has taken a liking to him.

Barker and Dove have a handler named Conrad (Kevin J. O’Connor). As a seasoned professional, he knows Barker well enough to speak to him in terse personal code — but for newbie Ellis, he needs to spell things out, including his deep respect for Barker’s work. For a love interest, Dove attempts to strike up a relationship with his neighbor, a law student named Rose (Lindsay Pulsipher), but he soon learns that the line of work he’s involved in (drug dealers, arms dealers, terrorists) creates a risk for an agent’s private life. Dove likes Rose, but he’s hesitant to get to know her because he would hate to see her get hurt. (more…)