"Boomtown" is set in Los Angeles and filmed there -- in Hollywood's old Raleigh Studios -- but for two of its stars, the ties that bind extend far beyond Tinseltown.

According to Neal McDonough, he and Donnie Wahlberg -- also his co-star in HBO's "Band of Brothers" -- were born in the same hospital in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.

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"Yeah," Wahlberg says, taking a break from filming at the battered table in the interrogation room on the police-headquarters set. "He likes to talk a good one about being from Dorchester. Dorchester people go to Cape Cod twice a year on the weekend, if they're lucky. They don't live there."

"I left," McDonough says, relaxing in an unused part of the set. "My parents got smart. My dad lived in Dorchester for a while, then decided he wanted to bring up his family on Cape Cod, opened this little mom-and-pop motel.

"There is a friendly rivalry between myself and Donnie on, like, everything. He is definitely one way; I'm definitely another way. We are so completely different in every aspect of our being that it works out really well together."

Airing Sundays on NBC, "Boomtown" views crimes from the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, police (Wahlberg, Mykelti Williamson, Gary Basaraba, Jason Gedrick), a reporter (Nina Garbiras), a paramedic (Lana Parrilla), and a district attorney (McDonough). It uses overlapping scenes, different camera angles, and other effects to track its complex, multilayered stories.

Wahlberg plays world-weary Detective Joel Stevens, who unsuccessfully tries to keep his marital troubles private.

McDonough plays David McNorris, a married, ambitious prosecutor who risked all by having an affair with equally ambitious reporter Andrea Little (Garbiras). Although Little ended the affair, the wounds and the passion linger.

Kate O'Hare

'Boomtown' actors take a crack at brotherly love