{alltv} After throwing a few weak jabs, 'Lights Out' finds its footing

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A bad first round doesn't always decide a fight.

There's little doubt that tonight's premiere of FX's latest man-on-a-rampage drama, Lights Out, is less than completely promising. And that starts with the basic premise, built on one of the most played-out dramatic tropes in American fiction: the Rocky-fied "Great White Hope" boxing fantasy.

The "hope" here is Irish-American Patrick "Lights" Leary (Holt McCallany), a 40-year-old former heavyweight boxing champ who remains a folk hero to those who think he was robbed of his title. From the outside, Lights still seems to have it all: a beautiful wife (Catherine McCormack); three lovely daughters; a fabulous moving-on-up suburban home; and a thriving gym run by his father (Stacy Keach). What you don't see is that boxing has left Lights with early dementia — and that his manager brother, Johnny (Pablo Schreiber), has left Lights close to penniless.

As Lights sees it, he has two choices: a rematch with the African-American champ that might leave him brain-dead, or a job as an enforcer for a local mobster. A third way — sell the house, pull the girls out of private school, get a normal job and live within your means — doesn't seem to occur to him, but he's hardly the first celebrity on the decline to skip that option.

The cleverly structured but dramatically underpowered premiere leaves you with the impression he'll go with "enforcer." But it's not doing the show a disservice to tell you that rather than choosing a career, what Lights has done is stumble into a dilemma, a clash between his better family-guy nature and his desire to hang on to hard-earned wealth and fame. And because he hasn't chosen, what at first seems to be a story of inevitable, thuggish decline takes on a more bittersweet, relatable cast as Lights struggles to correct his mistakes without actually owning up to them.

It helps immeasurably that the more time we spend with McCallany, the most interesting his performance becomes, and the easier it becomes to spot a star quality and magnetism that's not as readily apparent in the pilot. He make the most out of his interactions with Lights' three daughters (scenes that are sweet and sometimes funny, if a bit generic) while bringing out all the complexity of his relationship with his father and brother, excellently played by Keach and Schreiber.

Yet as good as Lights may be, it still suffers a bit by network association. A certain macho sameness has spread through the FX schedule, along with a troubling lack of diversity in the network's post-Rescue Meshows that is exemplified by Lights' creation of a modern-day Irish-American heavyweight boxing champion.

Still, it's not fair to hold bad network behavior against a good series — and after a so-so start, Lights Out does turn into a good series. A knockout? No. But sometimes, you have to be content to win on points.

Lights Out
FX, Tuesday, 10 ET/PT
* * * (out of four)