Piper's promising (paid) program

In 2000, some pegged Piper Perabo as The Next Big Thing In Movies when the unknown actress landed the lead role in Jerry Bruckheimer's "Coyote Ugly." Ten years and many flops later, Perabo just might be The Next Big Thing On Television -- assuming USA's new spy dramedy "Covert Affairs" lives up to its potential.

Last night's premiere seems to have everything going for it. Produced by "Bourne Identity" director Doug Liman, this lighter variation on "Alias" is a natural fit among USA's stable of breezy crime shows. It surrounds a sexy star with familiar, sexy faces in a bright, glossy environment. (Seriously, the photography in "Burn Notice," "Royal Pains" and "White Collar" borders on blinding.) "Covert Affairs" doesn't do anything particularly original, but it does its genre proud.

Those familiar, sexy faces are the main attraction. Perabo plays Annie Walker, a CIA recruit so skilled she bypasses her last month of training. Her boss is played by Kari Matchett, a blonde beauty who caught my attention on "ER," "24" and TNT's short-lived "Heartland." Her boss' husband (and fellow CIA bigwig) is played by Sandy Cohen himself, Peter Gallagher. Most welcome of all is Anne Dudek, "House's" dearly departed Cutthroat Bitch, as Annie's sister. Annie's de facto partner at the Agency, blind computer analyst Auggie, is played by Christopher Gorham, who has appeared in everything from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to "Ugly Betty."

So the cast is top-notch. The screenplay for Tuesday's premiere almost matches it, mostly for how economical it is. In the first 20-minute segment, we get Annie's important backstory, her training, her first assignment, and a glimpse of her home life. (Not to mention her first action sequence.) Annie meets the bad boy she'll undoubtedly hook up with by the end of the season (Eric Lively) and the trusted friend whose love will go unrequited (Gorham). Almost every line of dialogue, even ones that seem out of place, pays off. And the show wastes no time in exploiting its main asset -- Perabo sheds her clothes twice in the first three minutes.

The construction of the pilot is impeccable. The dialogue? Not so much. Two of our most feared enemies -- "There's a situation" and "It all happened so fast" -- rear their ugly heads in back-to-back scenes. The latter even shows up a second time.

But I'll take those tired cliches over the pilot's blatant product placement. It's one thing when an Apple logo appears on the back of a laptop. It's another thing altogether when the dialogue itself contains references to products, and "Covert Affairs" has no less than seven verbal plugs for Starbucks, Louboutins, Cherry Garcia and others. (Matchett's angry invocation of opentable.com struck me as being particularly forced.) I get that "Covert Affairs" was probably an expensive pilot, and that product placement is becoming more and more prominent across all forms of media, but "Covert Affairs" seemed to go above and beyond the call of duty, venturing close to "Nim's Island" territory. I've made peace with the product placement on reality shows -- repeat offender "Top Chef," for example, is essentially a dramatized game show -- but its intrusion on traditional scripted entertainment is getting to be a bit much.

That's the price we pay for watching commercial television, I suppose. It's not as if USA, AMC, FX and all the other new-ish players in the scripted show racket have an unlimited reservoir of money. What some of them do have are slick, entertaining shows, and "Covert Affairs" is a mostly welcome addition to USA's roster of sneaky successes. It's easy to root for a show with an extremely likable cast in a can't-miss premise. I just hope the characters stop being corporate shills.