When Michael Madsen died back in July, most of the obituaries and social-media appreciation focused on the actor's many collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, in which he played terrifyingly intense criminals with whispery voices. Mentioned far less often? Tilt, a rare star vehicle for Madsen. Tilt was a TV drama that ran for nine episodes in early 2005 on ESPN, back when that network -- like nearly every other cable outlet at the time -- was experimenting with original scripted programming.

Madsen is terrific in Tilt. He plays Don "The Matador" Everest, a Las Vegas legend, who has written books about poker strategy and has bankrupted hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of wannabe whales across his decades at high-stakes tables. By the time we meet him in Tilt, the Matador has developed a reputation as a genuinely dangerous man: vindictive, mob-connected, and working with a crew that helps him cheat.

This was a role made for Madsen. With his growly cadence and wounded eyes, he was built to play characters just past their prime, clinging fast to past glories. So why isn't Tilt better-remembered? Maybe because it isn't very good. Okay, that's too harsh. Tilt isn't terrible. It's just...off. The cast is solid, the creative team is strong, and the milieu -- the world of professional poker, captured at the height of the Texas Hold 'Em boom -- is fascinating. But the show feels caught between eras, still trying to be like the sensationalistic and shallow 1990s version of adult-oriented cable TV, at a time when other talented producers, writers, directors, and casts were making dramas and comedies as mature in artistic approach as they were in TV-MA content.

Tilt's co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien would join those ranks of top-shelf TV auteurs a decade later with their Showtime series Billions, which does a lot of what Tilt tried to do -- only much, much better. When they made this series, they were just a few years removed from writing the movie Rounders, a modest hit for director John Dahl (who also worked on Tilt) that had become a favorite among the emerging generation of poker players. In 2003, someone from that Rounders-loving generation -- Chris Moneymaker, an online poker stud with a killer surname -- won a much-watched World Series Of Poker main event on ESPN, super-charging the game's popularity and spawning hundreds of hours of poker programming on cable.

Tilt combines the grubby, small-time, underworld milieu of Rounders with the newfound glitz of the WSOP. The season's first half is about an attempted sting, as three young gamblers -- Eddie Towne (Eddie Cibrian), Clark Marcellin (Todd Williams), and "Miami" (Kristin Lehman) -- each nursing a deep personal grudge against Don Everest, warily join forces with grizzled Vegas oddsmaker Seymour Annisman (Kenneth Welsh) to try and set up their own rigged game with the Matador. In a genuinely surprising mid-season twist, the team's plan goes horribly awry. Someone at the Matador's home casino, the Colorado -- possibly its big boss, Jimmy Molloy (Michael Murphy) -- has Seymour killed. When Eddie's crew tries to take their revenge at the poker table, they discover the Matador is wise to their plan. He threatens to expose their own cheating to the cops unless they hand over their entire bankroll.

In the season's second half, the trio regroups with the help of two unlikely allies. An Iowa cop named Lee Nickel (Chris Bauer), whose brother was killed for going after the Matador, has been trying to assemble evidence of Everest's corruption, which these kids have witnessed firsthand. Meanwhile, the Colorado's former business manager, Bart "Lowball" Rogers (Don McManus), gives the angry players the money to buy into a fictionalized version of the WSOP (called the World Championship Of Poker) to allow them a second chance at getting even with the Matador via their poker skills.

Tilt wasn't ESPN's first scripted series. In the fall of 2003, the network debuted Playmakers, an issue-driven melodrama about professional football, which reportedly drew the ire of the NFL for its sensationalism. But with Tilt (despite renaming the WSOP the WCOP), ESPN was able to depict big-time poker more or less as it was circa 2005 in part because ESPN had helped codify poker's TV presentation.

Tilt's hyper-dramatized version of pro poker features cameos from multiple real-life players, including "bad boy" Phil Hellmuth, who pushes around the Matador in one hand and then later suffers a bad beat, angrily muttering "frickin' crime lord" as he moves away from the WCOP featured table. The WCOP scenes are shot to look just like the WSOP, with the same onscreen graphics and wry commentary from announcers Lon McEachern and Norman Chad. If nothing else, Tilt is a fairly accurate document of what the ESPN-driven poker mania looked and sounded like.