Terry Kinney (left) and Adam Goldberg. (
)

Richard Price won an Emmy for “The Wire.” (Tamara Beckwith)

In a television season where New York City received top billing in productions ranging from “Smash” to “Person of Interest,” “NYC 22,” a new cop drama created by Richard Price, takes the action to Harlem.

Why Harlem?

“I wanted to walk to work,” says Price.

Price has made career out of writing about his native city — he grew up in the Parkside Projects in The Bronx — and his acclaimed novels (“Lush Life,” “Clockers,” to name a few) bring a kaleidoscope of urban characters to life in fresh and indelible ways.

We meet in his favorite cafe on Lenox Avenue — where a mixed tape of soul music, made by Price, is playing — to talk about his quest to put “Harlem on the TV map.”

“It’s a good way of making a lot of money real quick,” he says in a deadpan manner of writing the pilot for Tribeca Films about a group of rookie cops. “And then it got picked up. I was startled.”

“People on TV like lawyers, doctors and cops. I don’t know anything about doctors. I don’t know anything about lawyers. I know just enough about cops to make it realistic,” he says.

The cast is a virtual UN of characters. There’s Ahmad Khan, an Afghani native played by British stage actor Tom Reed. Khan is partnered with Kenny McClaren (Stark Sands), a blond, straight-arrow, fourth-generation cop. Tonya Sanchez is the Latina rookie, played by newcomer Judy Marte. Jayson Toney (Harold House Moore) is the African-American beginner who coulda been a contender with the NBA and is saddled with the nickname Jackpot. Adam Goldberg plays Ray Harper, a downsized journalist whose age gap with his fellow rookies is ruefully underscored by his nickname: “Lazarus.”

In the show’s most inexplicable casting, blond Valkyrie Leelee Sobieski plays Jennifer Perry, a former Marine MP who was stationed in Iraq and is aptly called White House.

Of the 12 episodes that begin airing tonight, Price, 62, wrote the first two and the last two.

“NYC 22” offers crime scenes in a gentrified Morningside Park (“It’s a nice area. People aren’t getting killed in there anymore,” Price quips) to satisfy fans of the genre, but Price also supplies some classic, irascible New Yorkers that give the show some humor and texture, such as the widow of a veteran cop who calls the cops at the 22nd precinct to fix her backed-up toilet. When Jackpot tries to fix it and can’t, she taunts him about his failed basketball career. As played by Broadway legend Kathleen Chalfant, she could be a character in one of Price’s novels.

“I’m much more interested in the mundane things,” Price says. “But it’s TV, and there’s a big push to make things action-oriented — so what I have to do is take what I want and what they want, and find something we can both live with. The show’s kind of a mix of bank robberies and bombs-in-the-backpack with old ladies with stuffed toilets who are ball breakers. I’m more of a stuffed-toilet guy.”

What Price is not, it turns out, is a phone guy. He’s forced to yak with the suits at CBS to make sure viewers in the fly-over states get his smart-ass dialogue.

In recounting this mundane aspect of his job, Price rises to sarcastic heights imitating a corporate drone reviewing a 12-page script outline with him.

“‘Well, on Page 6, would we really have Adam [Goldberg] say that or do this?’ he says nasally. “These calls can last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour-plus. And then you get permission to actually write the episode. It’s not about creativity. It’s about the demographic. You’re not writing for yourself. You’re not even writing for New York. You’re writing so that people in Idaho like the show.”

Price, who lives with novelist Lorraine Adams (“Harbor”), was a hired gun before, on HBO’s acclaimed “The Wire,” and says that even when you have a name you still get rewritten.

“The writers were friends of [creator] David Simon’s: Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos. You were invited in on everything, but once you finished your episode. Simon, he just steamrollered what you wrote. So sometimes you have some of Pelecanos’ scenes in your episode and some of my scenes in Lehane’s episode. It’s an assembly line. It’s a five-star assembly line, but it’s an assembly line.

“This one, I’m the creator. If I could write every episode, I would. But then you have to trust the writers. And when they’re finished, it’s my turn to steamroller. But I was kind of a lackadaisical steamroller. I was more like a push mower.”

On “NYC 22,” Price has his requisite multiculti rookies, but they would be nowhere without the stern, paternal sergeant who whips the newbies into shape. That role, Daniel “Yoda” Dean, is played by veteran actor Terry Kinney, who co-starred with Goldberg on another rookie cop drama, “The Unusuals,” on ABC, several seasons ago.

Kinney, who lives in Park Slope, reports that as much as Price wanted to put Harlem on the map, the neighborhood wasn’t always ready for its close-up.

“The show is about the uneasy relationship between the police and the neighborhood. We had the same uneasy relationship,” he says. One motorcycle gang would circle a block where production was stationed, just to interrupt filming. “These guys would really taunt us, riding on their back wheels. Scarves around their faces so they couldn’t be identified,” he says.

But even the most obnoxious behavior in New York beats the sterility of LA locations, Kinney says.

“We were filming the 11th episode, and the director said, ‘I’m in LA most of the time, and nothing is going to look like this.’ ”

Price says that now that he’s finished with the first season of “NYC 22,” he can get back to that novel he’s writing about Harlem, which will hopefully do for his neighborhood what “Lush Life” did for the Lower East Side.

“I’ve spent a year hanging out with undertakers and cops, ministers and people in my neighborhood,” he says. “I put it on the back burner when this happened. I want to get back to writing novels. Nobody can tell you what to do when you’re writing a novel.”

NYC 22

Tonight, 10 p.m., CBS