"Day Break" is pretty exciting, even gripping, for about the first half hour. But only for about the first half hour.

Taye Diggs stars as Los Angeles police detective Brett Hopper, and, boy oh boy, is he having a bad day. Again and again and again.

Everything seems hunky-dory when he wakes up on this particular morning. He's in bed with a beautiful woman (Moon Bloodgood) and, other than a little shaving accident, it has promise of being a beautiful day.

But suddenly Hopper is arrested for a murder he didn't commit. His beautiful alibi is missing. And there's some sort of shadowy conspiracy behind all of this.

It's sort of "24" — until it turns into "Groundhog Day." Really.

At the end of this confusing, violent, unbelievably bad day, Hopper wakes up and it's the very same day all over again. Except that, knowing what he now knows, he tries to change things. Which he does, to some extent, but not enough to make a difference. After all, this is a 13-episode series that's taking the place of "Lost" until that show returns in February, so you can't expect any answers to come quickly.

"Day Break" (8 p.m., Ch. 4) doesn't even make sense within the weird world it creates. Injuries that Hopper suffers carry through from one day to the next, while people who are brutally murdered show up without a scratch the next time he wakes up.

Maybe the show would have worked as a straight thriller, without the "Groundhog Day" weirdness. Maybe the "Groundhog Day" weirdness would have worked with something other than a deadly, humorless thriller.

But the two don't work together at all.

It isn't like we only have to go through this 13 times, either. The first episode alone (two air back-to-back tonight at 8 and 9) finds Hopper waking up three times.

By the end of the first hour, I was already saying, "What? Again? No!" By the end of the second hour, I was hoping that somebody would just kill all these people and put them out of our misery.

It wasn't just that I didn't care what was happening, I was actively annoyed. And most writers/producers/networks don't really want to annoy viewers so much that they'll run screaming for the remote.

The thought of 11 more hours of this is more than I can take. Maybe "Day Break" could be used as a method of torture — strap the prisoners in and force them to watch hour after hour after hour until they break.

I'm betting it wouldn't take all 13 hours.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com