There was a surreal aspect to watching the pilot episode of Shades of Blue. It begins with a suspect being shot twice by rookie cop Michael Loman (Dayo Okeniyi) while the suspect was playing a video game. His veteran partner, Harlee Santos (Jennifer Lopez) then stages an exchange of fire. You have to admire the courage of writer and creator Adi Hasak for trying to write a sympathetic portrait of a corrupt cop who covers up a police-related shooting. In 2015, 1,134 black men were killed by police in the United States, including several high profile cases like Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old shot by the Cleveland, Ohio police, Walter Scott, shot by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times by a Chicago, Illinois police officer. In the case of McDonald, while the shooting took place in 2014, the case became a public sensation in November 2015 with the release of a dashcam video that allegedly contradicted the police reports. Entertainment does not happen in a vacuum, and it seems inconceivable that the producers would greenlight a show where the main (sympathetic) character masterminds the cover-up of a police-involved shooting.
Hasak does hedge his bets a bit. While the perpetrator was unarmed, he was playing a video game that had gun shots in it. Additionally, he was a drug dealer pedaling toxic heroin. All in all, he was a pretty bad guy, and the circumstances made the shooting understandable. This relative morality – it’s ok to do bad things to bad people — looks to be the pattern of the series. As the title indicates, there are no good guys or bad guys: just people doing things for various reasons, forcing the audience to make a choice to judge people by their actions or their intents.
The plot line is that Lopez’s Santos is a member of a group of corrupt cops lead by Matt Wozniak (Ray Liotta). She gets singled out by FBI agent Robert Stahl (Warren Kole) because she’s a single mother. These three characters dominate the episode, in which Hasak seems to be asking the audience to judge people by their intent, not necessarily their actions.
Keeping her prodigy daughter Cristina Santos (Sara Jeffery) safe defines Detective Santos. While a cliché, it’s a very understandable and relatable motivation. Vince Gilligan based all of Breaking Bad on this cliché, although he was able to do so because it became clear that Walter White (Bryan Cranston) protecting his family was just the lie White told himself to excuse the inexcusable. It’s way too early in Shades of Blue to guess how much Hasak will blur the line between material protection and an open-ended indulgence.
There are also quite a few precedents for Ray Liotta’s turn as Wozniak. His version of the corrupt cop, who is both on the take and looking out for the community, has been done many times before. Two scenes in particular set up his personality. In one, he dumps funerary ashes on the face of the local drug lord as he explains that the dealer’s business and life exists only with his consent. In a second scene, he interrogates a suspect he’d just arrested before deciding his fate. In both scenes, Wozniak acts as the neighborhood czar. He manages the crime to insure that the least amount of innocent people gets hurt; he also makes a filthy amount of money doing so.
As for the FBI agent, Hasak writes and Kole plays Stahl as a smarmy sadist who seems to enjoy watching Santos twist on his hook a bit too much. Every interaction between Stahl and Santos involves him forcing her to consent to doing something she doesn’t want to do, predisposing the audience to dislike Agent Stahl. In this instance, we get the other side of the equation: one can do good things, like trying to build a case against a unit of corrupt cops on the take, and yet the audience will root against him.
The pilot episode of Shades of Blue shares the same flaws as most pilots. The characters are introduced way too fast. Further, playing with moral ambiguity has almost become its own cliché. Ironically, one of the things the series is missing in trying to map the continuum between good and bad are examples of each poll. For the cliché to work, the series needs at least one unassailably good person and one inexcusably evil person. Once that gets plugged in, Lopez, Liotta, and Kole look to have enough charisma to make for a watchable television show.