Tonight TNT is launching a new series starring Dylan McDermott titled Dark Blue. This Jerry Burkheimer produced series follows the lives of a team of ultra-undercover cops lead by Carter Shaw (Dylan McDermott). The series is gritty, dark, and asks the question of just how far is acceptable for an undercover cop to go in order to put away some of the worst criminals imaginable.
Cop shows are kind of like medical shows in my book, which is to say that they’re hardly ever worth watching. They all pretty much follow the same model, and they all pretty much explore the same types of stories. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some good cop shows that have been made over the years. The Shield, The Wire, and even last season’s newcomer, Southland all painted very engaging and realistic police drama situations. In fact, one of my all time favorite cop shows was Wiseguy, another series that asked some of the same questions posed by Dark Blue, which is how far undercover can you go and still be one of the good guys?
The Pilot opens with a dark and violent scene of an undercover FBI agent being tortured. The agent is dumped in an alleyway and left for dead. The FBI surveilence tape shows one of Carter Shaw’s men, Dean Bendis (Marshall-Green) dumping the body out of the truck, though the FBI doesn’t know who he is at the time, nor do they even know what it is that Carter Shaw and his team do. But the surveilance footage leads Shaw to wonder if his undercover agent has flipped sides or not.
So Shaw sends out one of his other agents, Ty Curtis (Hardwick), to find Bendis and determine which side he’s playing for. Ty is recently married and seems to be struggling with his double-life. Next Shaw enlists a new agent, Jaimie Allen (Nicki Aycox), who’s greatest skill is her ability to lie to people under pressure. Together the three of them spend the rest of the episode trying to determine if Bendis is legit or not, and still ensure that the bad guy get’s taken down.
The good news is that Dark Blue is just plain old fun and entertaining television. The pilot was very satisfying to watch with compelling, well acted characters and edge of your seat drama. The chemistry between Hardwick’s Ty Curtis and Marshall-Greene’s Dean Bendis was great and they played off of one another well. Nicki Aycox was good in what little we saw of her in this episode, though more time is needed to flesh out her character’s place in this story. Finally, Dylan McDermott plays the part of the dark and mysteries loner-crime-fighter with grace and ease. I love McDermott but had strong fears of whether he could pull this role off and play such a darker character. He put those fears to rest in the first episode.
The bad news is that in addition to being dark and gritty, Dark Blue is also quite humorless and a little cliched. Humorless isn’t a bad thing for a police drama of this sort normally, but in this case Dark Blue stands out from the other series on TNT with a much more ominous overall tone and hardly enough to even crack half a smile at. Personally, I felt like the lack of humor ramped up the anticipation and tension in the episode, but you can’t help but worry if this series really fits in with the other shows that TNT has to offer. It’s also a little unclear to me what this show is trying to be, going forward. If Dark Blue wants to be compared to The Shield or The Wire, then they need to work on things a bit more, and tone down the clicked cop stuff. However, it seems more to me like Dark Blue is trying to carve out its own niche in the vast world of police procedurals. They’re certainly on the right track and will have me tuning in for more.
Dark Blue premieres on TNT on July 15 at 10/9 central.
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