Television never gets tired of fighting crime. From the earliest days, TV cops have chased TV crooks, caught them and slapped on the cuffs, and viewers have gone away satisfied.

One new crime fighter and one pair make debuts this week on cable, but they're very modern examples of their kind. They have issues, and attitudes, and messy personal lives. Crooks have to take a number if they expect to be caught.

For Jim Longworth (Matt Passmore) of "The Glades," arriving Sunday on A&E, "the job" is something to do when he's not playing golf.

Jim was the best detective on the Chicago police force — just ask him — before his captain shot him in the rear. The captain was sure Jim was sleeping with his wife; Jim insists he was innocent, but he took his settlement and left town, settling in tiny Palm Glade, Fla., a stone's throw from the Everglades, and signing on with the state police.

His idea was to play lots and lots of golf and generally laze around in the sunshine. He didn't count on a mini-crime wave hitting Palm Glade, and in the series opener, he's feeling very put out about it.

Passmore, who is Australian, plays Jim as deliberately annoying and charmingly cocky, but not quite insufferable. He's full of himself, sure he's the smartest person in his new department and possibly in the state of Florida, but then, he's probably right.

As he tells a witness, while eating a burrito, "I'm an expert on all things homicidal. There isn't much about murder I don't know, or can't figure out, if I keep asking the right questions."

In the opener, a young man who slept in his car on the edge of the swamp awakens to a stomach-turning scene — a headless corpse, floating in the water. The resulting investigation involves a year-old hit-and-run death and an autopsy on an alligator; Jim also suffers a bite that sends him to the hospital and introduces him to Callie (Kiele Sanchez), a nurse and medical student with a 12-year-old son and an estranged husband in prison.

Based on the series opener, "The Glades" will be driven more by personality and potential romance than by fingerprints and forensics. Creator Clifton Campbell comes from USA's "White Collar," which begins its second season at 8 p.m. Tuesday and features a similar, trendy mix of comedy and drama.

If "The Glades" is 'sunny with a chance of homicide," as A&E bills it, then TNT's new "Rizzoli & Isles" is gloomy with a chance of gore. Except when it's not.

Based on a series of mystery novels by Tess Gerritsen, "Rizzoli & Isles" is built around a pair of female crime fighters. Angie Harmon is Boston detective Jane Rizzoli; Sasha Alexander is Dr. Maura Isles, the medical examiner with whom Rizzoli frequently works.

The women are also best friends, executive producer Janet Tamaro says, although in the opener (inspired by Gerritsen's first "R&I" book, "The Surgeon") their friendship may still be in the early stages.

The series opens with a grim scene — a man, bound with duct tape; a woman crying pitifully. When Rizzoli, escaping her abrasive, in-your-face Boston family, arrives at the scene, the man is dead, his throat cut, while the woman is missing.

The murder's method reminds Rizzoli of a case from her past, involving a serial killer known as the Surgeon. He's still locked up, though; could he somehow have an apprentice?

"Rizzoli & Isles" also features Bruce McGill as Rizzoli's former partner, Lee Thompson Young as her new one and Lorraine Bracco as her unbearable mother. Although the crime scenes can be overly graphic and thus hard to watch, it's the family scenes that are truly painful. No more, please.

On the other hand, the friendship between Rizzoli and Isles is sweet and often funny, with the two women portrayed as polar opposites — Rizzoli as an escapee from that loud, rough family and Isles as an ice princess, a child of privilege who always (Rizzoli says) looks as if she's ready for a photo shoot. She's also quietly brilliant and seems to know everything about everything: "You're better than Wikipedia," Rizzoli tells her.

"The Glades" suggests, in straightforward fashion, that people who tune in each week will see a put-upon cop enduring fools and solving cases, maybe sometimes even getting his comeuppance.

"Rizzoli & Isles" is harder to categorize. The series promises that it's about two women who are very different and yet together form an effective team — "two smart, strong, competent women who instinctively drop the protective shield when they're with each other," as Tamaro puts it.

That would be great. But if "Rizzoli & Isles" turns out to be a gruesome, gory "Criminal Minds" with female leads, well, no thanks.

"The Glades" Three stars (out of four)

"Rizzolo & Isles" Two and a half stars (out of four)