One of the more pleasant surprises of the current TV season is CBS's "Cane," which gets better with every episode.

Sure, this serialized drama (Tuesdays, 9 p.m., Ch. 2) about a Cuban-American family is a soap opera, but we're not talking amnesia, catfights and characters returning from the dead.

It's a family drama that centers on Alex Vega (Jimmy Smits), who's rich, powerful and genuinely a good guy — but his devotion to his family and his family business has a darker side.

He's so committed to protecting the family he loves that Alex has gotten in bed, so to speak, with gangsters. He even ordered the killing of a genuinely bad guy who killed Alex's adopted sister and threatened his children.

If a good guy does bad things to bad guys, is he still a good guy?

"He's a very complicated character," Smits said. "That's the great thing about him."

And the show is about more than just one character. It's the story of an immigrant family. There's a huge cast made up mostly of members of the Duque family — beginning with the family patriarch Pancho (Hector Elizondo) and matriarch Amalia (Rita Morena), who fled Cuba with nothing and built an empire.

"A second generation that was born somewhere else, came here, worked hard and saw their family become wealthy," said executive producer Jonathan Prince. "And now they're fighting over the wealth."

Alex and Frank (Nestor Carbonell) do most of the fighting. Pancho chose Alex (the adopted son who married his daughter) over biological son Frank to run the family empire.

And there's a third generation, born in America, who were "born on third base and thought they hit a triple — entitled, rich, spoiled, with problems, drugs, alcohol, car crashes," Prince said.

All of which, he readily admits, is "soapy stuff."

But good soapy stuff that's turned out to be entertaining and involving.

At least for those who are watching. And not a whole lot of people are — the show could use some help in the ratings.

Let's hope CBS has the patience to let the audience build. "Cane" is worth it.

SOMETIMES TV is just TV.

Sure, "Cane" is a rarity in that it's about a Cuban-American family, and there aren't a whole lot of Latinos on TV. But that doesn't mean that the characters have to be either representative of — or role models for — all Latinos.

"This is television," Prince said. "It's a diversion. This is intended to entertain (and) provoke. I think if we have a discussion that says, 'What's the responsibility of doing a show about a Latino cast and letting them be murderers and letting them be people who are angry at each other and letting them betray their families,' I don't know."

There's one very important reason why these characters aren't just wonderful people who all get along all the time.

"Because nice families don't get their pilots picked up," Prince said.

Exactly.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com